Weekly Dev Update 12

7 Days Sick | Muse In Composer

Last week I experienced some of the worst influenza I’ve had in several years. I remember being fairly insufferable for my first bout with covid a few years ago, but this was so miserable, for so long, also while having my pregnant wife sick, and needing to care for a child, made this the worst sick experience I’ve had since long before this. Also, with covid, we culturally had an expectation that you won’t be coming back into the office for a bit, so there was a lot less pressure to ‘feel healthy’ asap, which was another variable added into the mess.

Not to mention, I’m personally not built to not be productive in some way. So all in all, being sick wasn’t a cake walk. However, I’m starting to feel much better, I can at least think clearly, so I wanted to give the first update I’ve had in a few weeks.

At work, it’s been one of those phases where I’ve had much more work to do, with what I feel are drastically shorter deadlines. Not quite deadlines you see, we don’t have many deadlines, but just more ’expectation’ that things ought to be handed in soon. On a team of one, that leaves a lot riding on me, and after grinding pretty hard for the last month, and not ever really feeling any off-ramp to the high expectations, I’m starting to feel a little exhausted. It was the 3rd weekend in a row where I felt a lot of pressure to avoid side project work, instead using my off-hours time to work on work projects, when I realized, that the sacrifice didn’t seem to have much of a reward. I’d fractionally catch up, burning away family time, or relaxation time, to fractionally increase work productivity? Whereas, I get quite a lot of value from working on my solo side projects, so I finally re-oriented this weekend back to working on side projects.

Muse: Composer Success, Better Emails

Project Muse finally got some love again, I now have Docker compose managing all 4 microservices successfully. This took way longer than I expected, and mainly the reason I had so many issues was not understanding how to write Dockerfiles, and trying to let Claude do as much of the heavy lifting as I could. Eventually, me going through it manually, a little more slowly, fixed everything up, and it’s successfully running the services.

Along with that, I now have the emails I’m writing to myself giving better summaries of the conversations. Just as a review, because the project has changed somewhat. The goal is to be able to create a camera & or audio device, and get summaries of conversations. I like to pretend it’s a spy device, but it’s also just a really helpful note taking system. I can also configure certain triggers as an alert. Such as my name, if the transcript detects my name, it’s construct an alert, including what alert has been triggered, the quote from the transcript that caused the alert to be triggered, and a summary of what was said from the alert. Along with these are the ’topics’, which is just a summary of the general topics mentioned through the conversation, and a slightly longer summary is available. Since these conversations could end up being quite long, it’s a nice-to-have feature for me.

Broken Meetup

I also, due to being so sick, couldn’t make it to my local golang meetup, which I organized, and prepared a presentation for. I was really looking forward to this, but was sweating while just being upright. I wasn’t convinced I could even drive there safely, let alone sit up and speak for 10-20 minutes straight on a technical topic, while walking through the code in front of a small crowd. I instead let the meetup turn into a social event, and may need to start preparing some way for the meetup to have a backup speaker in the future.

Summary:

It was a good week, even though I’m exhausted from being sick, and missed my meetup, I did move project Muse forward. While I do feel like I’m very interested in the idea of no longer working on this project, I won’t lie that it’s still such a fun challenge with every step, and I’m incredibly proud of what I’ve done thus far, I really can’t wait to go back to something a little less ‘urgent’.