Coder's Desiderata

Resting Up

Mid-September marks the end of a peak to work related activities. We hold an annual conference for our users. There’s usually multiple projects that have to be launched right before or the day of the event.

The first week of November is when BlizzCon is usually held, which makes August – November a pretty busy time of the year.

With COVID still here and a danger, there is no BlizzCon this year, which is a bummer. I enjoy being around the community and developers while learning what Blizzard has in the works. I really enjoy the excitement from both fans and developers.

So with no big events coming up and stuff at work settling down, I will have some energy to put towards other things.

Some Downtime

I’ve been recovering from the September conference rush. It was less stressful than previous years, but still took a lot out of me.

I haven’t been feeling like doing much creative-wise, which is unfortunate. Right before the conference I was gathering information about other content creators in software engineering that produce content. I’m hoping to make some progress with content creation soon.

Some Games

I have been catching up on a lot of games, many are titles I’ve been meaning to play for a while.

  • Amnesia: The Dark Descent
  • Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
  • Assassin’s Creed I & II
  • Borderlands I & II
  • Tomb Raider
  • Bendy and the Ink Machine

Each of these were really good. Hellblade in particular was a very immersive experience, and I loved the puzzles and combat.

I’m currently working through Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel and playing Phasmophobia with friends.

Bendy and the Ink Machine

I played through Bendy and the Ink Machine this month. This is a nice indie game with a retro aesthetic.

I will be covering some spoilers here, so don’t read on if you don’t want anything spoiled.

Gameplay

For me, gameplay over all was fun and entertaining. There was a combination of puzzles, action fighting, and scary-monster hiding.

Henry, the character you play, loses his weapon often. So gameplay transitions between puzzle solving, stealth, and fighting. I think this kept game play fresh and enemies interesting.

With that said, there were some moments that didn’t feel so good.

I played on the Switch, which was mostly fine, but there were some moments that it felt like mouse and keyboard were more appropriate. In particular, the corrupt Boris fight was hard because I couldn’t grab the ink globs fast enough and the second phase of the fight where Boris leap-attacks you if you are too far away was pretty unforgiving.

The last chapter, The Last Reel, was rough and in some ways disappointing to me.

Coming from the Boris fight, the experience was taking a bad turn because the gameplay didn’t feel fair. More specifically, the Switch controls didn’t seem to be working for me. (I’m primarily a PC gamer, so maybe that explains a bit too)

Clearing blobs from the wheel of the paddlewheel was a neat mechanic, but unforgiving if you don’t work quickly. Again, with the Switch controls, this was rough. If I spent too much time trying to aim for the control that makes the paddlewheel move forward, I would die.

After the paddlewheel, the onslaught of searchers, lost ones, and Sammy were a bit frustrating because it was too easy to die. I was unable to attack without getting hit. It’s possible my timing was just bad, but I think I was probably suppose to attack, turn around, and run away before the enemy attacked, which was too much on the Switch.

After this, there was the administration offices. I had to dodge the Butcher gang while retrieving blobs to create three pipes. This was a simple stealth sequence. I was tempted to cheese it by just running through the level, but instead I took my time to properly avoid the baddies.

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Youtube Creator Research

I want to share some of the content creators I’ve come across while exploring what content and personalities are out there for web development.

Since I’m planning on generating content myself, I thought it was important to see what common practices and structure is out there.

KimComplete

KimComplete has some videos that cover their own experience in web development, as well as what worked for them and answers important questions that someone new to the industry will want to know.

Reading from the comments of this video, I think it’s really cool how inspirational this content was to others. Not only did Kim successfully get into the web development industry, they are also a woman and person of color.

This video helped remind me that everyone learns differently and that it’s very possible to become discouraged in learning something new if the learning style doesn’t fit.

While written examples and how-tos can be helpful, they aren’t very interactive or don’t have the pacing that some learners desire. This is something I have in mind with my tutorials, I would like them to be interactive.

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Scheduled Maintenance: April Edition

In February I wrote my first scheduled maintenance piece. It’s my chance to reflect and plan on career goals.

In February I was concerned about keeping my skills sharp. I spend a good chunk of my day talking to people, coordinating on projects, and gathering business requirements. This leaves little time for actual coding.

To be honest, one of the biggest challenges I have been running into for the last year is staying on top of changes and new trends in the stacks we work with.

React and state management tools in particular have been challenging to keep up on because those libraries are evolving quite rapidly and in some cases like React hooks, very dramatically from a design perspective.

Building Tools

I found a nice middle ground here, thanks to some coaching advice. I can use my my spare time to develop tools that help me in my role as a manager while staying in touch with changes in technology.

This inspired me to fix up a custom burndown chart and get it working again. As well as adding a new tab with Github activity stats.

I’m using the burndown chart in our standups and retrospectives, it has been really useful.

The Github activity report is pretty early in development, but it helped me become aware of a SASS file that was refactored (nice improvement) and another file that probably needs to be broken up.

Learning

As I mentioned, my progress was inspired by a coaching session. I feel very motivated and have several more things I want to try now.

In addition to the coaching session, I finished the book The Phoenix Project. This has me thinking about continuous deployment and streamlining our development process.

I also virtually-attended Failover Conf, which exposed me to the dev-ops world a bit. There are many takeaways I got from that too.

What’s Next?

So what’s next? Work-life balance.

My goal this month (May) is to work my leisure and hobbies back into my routine. This past week I was really focused on the burndown chart and Github reports and didn’t give myself enough time to relax. I felt this towards the end of the week.

In addition, I want to see how I can cut down on meeting. These days I hold and attend LOTS of meeting. I need to have some time for engineering.

Some learning I plan on picking up Testing Javascript by Kent C. Dodds.

Getting More Familiar with Docker

I’ve been spending this week getting more familiar with Docker. I’ve learned how to build new images, spin up a collection of related containers with Docker Compose, and push an image to AWS.

I’m pretty excited about how this will help my team, but I’m also nervous about the unknowns we’ll encounter. My goal is to free up time, not take up more.

It’s important to know what Docker is and isn’t. To be honest, I’m still a little fuzzy. I wrote about this in my last post.

Docker utilizes virtualization technology to run processes in isolated environments called Containers. It has some similarities to virtual machine technology, such as VMWare and VirtualBox.

Docker Containers do not hold an OS, but they do have libraries and binaries from other OSes.

After working with Docker a little, I’m now much familiar with commands to setup a container and access the container (docker exec -it is my friend). I’ve also gotten more familiar with docker-compose (docker-compose up/down are pretty cool).

The documentation for Drupal on Docker provides info on both setting up Drupal and MySQl.

I’ve been able to spin up a Redis and MySQL server with Docker, it has simplified the setup and given my team a consistent toolset.

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