Weekly Dev Update 5
Professional API Research
At work, I had been given the opportunity to do a ton of research into what API we plan to use for a service. Never have I been required to go this deep on the documentation of several different API’s, their pricing plans. Going back and forth with our analytics team to see what exactly we needed. It forced me to flex my brain in a very different way. Whiile I wouldn’t say I want to do something like that all the time, I found it crucial experience, and I certainly hope I made the right decisions. One of the many harms of not having a more senior developer to rely on, is that the weight of responsibility falls square on my own shoulders.
First DevOps Meetup
This week was the first week that I have been an organizer for a local tech meetup! It feels crazy rewarding to see a bunch of people come together, mayhaps in small part, because of you. It’s a great way to meet some great people, who come from who-knows-what walk of life. Great chance to learn, and see what other people and companies find important across your area. I still have no clue how all of these amazing, and fun, opportunities keep falling in my lap. I must have a personal agenda to simply seize any and all things that I feel I can cultivate into something greater than it would be otherwise. So far, it has been leading to a great deal of both exhaustion, and profound joy and meaning that persists with me all the time. I know my life looks exhausting, but I can’t recommend thid lifestyle, at least attempting it for a short time, strongly enough.
Improving the Blog
This week I made a push to configure this blog to be more accessible. From my time working in a marketing team, I know more than I’d like about SEO, and the disadvantages a blog like this has. Whil I am not sure that I will ever really be actively trying to put energy into creating a successful blog, I do want to have the infrastructure to give this blog its best chance at success if the demand for it arose.
In leiu of this, I got the blog up and indexable for Google. I removed some of my github actions because I simply don’t know what I am doing over there, and I simply don’t have enough of a desire to learn. I see the power in it, and eventually I am confident I will be forced to learn it, but today was not that day.
Acheivements on my LinkedIn
This week I smashed my known previous ath for weekly impressions & engagements. About a year ago, I was graduating from tech Elevator, and getting a job. I had managed to creep over 2k impressions, however, after a long 10 months since then, I managed to push over 3500 impressions this week. These were 2 very different phases that led to the personal records in my networking. In Tech Elevator, much of my momentum was fueled by my desperation to become employed. Another part of it was sitting in a room with close to 100 people every day. I had a more tightly knit pool to draw from the well. At that time, I peaked during my graduating week & job announcement, near 2700 impressions. A massive lead over what I had accomplished before, so I feel quite proud.
Where I am now, much of the momentum comes from pushing my blog posts, pushing projects I am working on, pushing my enthusiasm for others as well. Some of my biggest posts of all time were me waxing on my appreciation for my enchanting wife, and pushing to help other people get the word out about what they have going on. I feel like this record was broken via very hard work
Golang Game Dev
This will be a much stronger note for next week… All I will say for now is, I found a way to do game development in ASCII. I hadn’t planned on making this game for many years, due to a very large number of things I would have had to learn to make it. However, someone inspired me in my local network with an ASCII image of a pokemon that looked amazing. From that point on, I became certain that I could make an MVP of the game of my dreams, make it in a way that was deeply fun for me personally. I plan to make many blog posts on the subject as I take the punches of learning, so keep on the lookout for that
Integrating Obsidian Note Taking Into My Life
A friend told me that I was keeping WAY too many things up in my head. A giant to-do list. I try to keep my Microsoft Teams Task Board(shivers) seperate from my personal life. However, I realized that my life has genuinely become far too complicated. I have a blog, a Meetup to organize for, a developer job with 6 hours sitting in traffic for every week, a beautiful wife, a miracle of a child, a very devoted faith, so many personal projects, and soon I’ll be making video content via streaming. There is simply no way to reasonably keep up with this. I am out of RAM.
Here, Obsidian steps in. This week I got my directory of note files, placed into Git. Now I can push changes to my notes and get pretty green squares on GitHub. After all, I consider GitHub to be where you show your devotion to programming. Not exclusively code work. I am just starting to use the Canvas features to draw out data flows. I make a Jira task board. This still needs altered, maybe color coding to see the catagories of tasks (blog, personal, work, meetup, streaming) faster. But all in all, I can feel it releiving some of the stress in the back of my head. Once before I tried Obsidian, but it was more of a want, rather than a need. Now, it is ominously close to a need if I want to keep taking on more and more projects in my personal life. I am not nearly to the point of goint to conferences for presentations, but I would love to be. There’s much I have planned to do, and Obsidian is a great way to start keeping track of ideas to look back on when I have more time.
In the near future, I want to figure out how to text notes to Obsidian while I am on the move. I would also like to find a way to incorporate my Google Calendar to it. If all I managed was to sync my calendar events as notes on the Calendar widget, that would be just fine. But adding deadline-based events on my calendar (such as weekly dev updates) would go a long long way for me.