Weekly Dev Update

Creating Content & Developing User Registration

Registration Form

This week, what I spent the most time building was the continued work on my registration form. Returning to a sort of mid-level phase, adding sessions to a database, not stored locally in a map. This is nearly complete, but I hope to get that complete, and begin adding tests. I haven’t made database unit testing in Golang, so that’s something that really excites me. I am finding that I really enjoy, as a developer, the experience of dealing with, and navigating through the processing, manipulating of data. Working with a database, architecting multi-step solutions, and producing useful data to the user, is something that feels exciting to me right now.

Although a lot happened this week, I am generally unhappy with the amount of time I actually spent programming. I am not sure totally what to do about this, except get better at saying no when people ask for my time. I know that a mix of Meetups, reading textbooks, and blog writing is going to take chunks out of my time. However, programming should be at least 40-50% of my time, in my ideal world. This week, it felt closer to 20-30% of my ‘productive’ time was spent with hands on my keyboard. My hope is that I can get live-streaming onto a consistent schedule, which will offer a lot of extra time programming every week that I am not currently getting.

Technical Blog Post

This week I committed to learning Golang’s net/http library are a more comprehensive level. Especially being able to really understand, and logically follow my own web server, borrowing the functions, types, and methods found within. In essence, it dives fairly deep into Handle(), Handler() HandleFunc() HandlerFunc() and ServeHTTP. I would say my understanding for these functions, methods, types, and interface skyrocketed within just a few hours of writing, failing to explain, chatting with ChatGPT about my assumptions. It was a fantastic experience, I grew a ton, and it really landed for me how valuable it is to have a blog, and how much growth will happen as I continue. A blog isn’t fancy, or unique, but it isn’t for users, as much as it is for me to spar with my ideas, and radically increase the speed of my growth as a developer.

Commitment to Creating A Twitch Stream

This week I contacted a friend of mine. She has a following on Twitch, and has been doing it for years, so I was really happy to hear her show interest in helping me get from 0-60 on setting up my own channel. My main goal is simply to have a schedule where I am on camera. Giving me a few great resources. I think I will get a bit better at public speaking, better at coding while others are watching, possibly find other Golang developers who can give me some mentorship, networking, and most importantly, that many hours programming that I was not before. I want to focus on either creating my first real web project that is a production-level project, more than my side projects that start and end with my boundaries and interest. Instead, make a website that is trying to provide value to a community. I may also consider working through ‘Writing an Interpreter in Go’ on stream, as it’s a book I have been interested in, as it would expose me to a lot of new concepts.

Creating a Presentation On AI For My Team

After attending some local presentations, and an online webinar on how to create RAG AI services with Golang, I decided to do a presentation for my team at work on the kinds of products I am seeing companies make, where they have proven value. I don’t like hype cycles generally. However, I am very interested in new technology, and finding creative ways to use that to create a competitive advantage. One way to leverage AI that does seem to have some legs, is better chatbot products. That can come in many forms, but a chatbot that helps users with better access to custom data feels very powerful to me. So one of the projects I really want to work on and build is a RAG AI project. In the meantime, I brainstormed some ideas of RAG services a company like ours can benefit from, and how they work at a high level. I got some slides together to have something visual to show. Since the presentation is next week, I want to try and make a demo project.