Well look at that, I really did it. After a flashback of my January 2022, there is now also the follow-up edition for February. So here comes my flashback of my February, related to work, private projects, web presence and a few interspersed other topics.
Work
First month with a 44 hour work week
In the January flashback I already announced that I signed a contract adjustment. Because of this, I now have a 44 hour work week. The main reason for this change was the fact that with a 40 hour work week with a split of 28 hours and 12 hours per employer, coordination was very difficult. Previously, this meant that I always had to split up one day. With the increase to 32 hours at my primary job, I now have 4 days where I am fully present, and it’s all going great. At my second job, I didn’t want to reduce the 12 hours even more, so now it has come down to the extra hours. During the first weeks of the month it all worked very well. I had tasks that I could tackle well before or after my other job, and so I sometimes didn’t even have to work on the weekend. On another week, I worked on Saturday and then I also worked more than 44 hours, so that I had a little time buffer for another week. So far, I’m still quite happy with the arrangement. We”ll see how it turns out in the future.
New old project at work
Right at the beginning of the month, I switched projects at work. The project I’m working in now is not completely unfamiliar to me, though. Before I wrote my bachelor thesis, I already worked on this project as a student employee. In this project we are developing a service tool that runs on a small hardware device. With this tool, service technicians can connect to a system and perform analyses and maintenance using our software on their PC in the browser.
The interesting thing is that now exactly the topic I have been working on for the last months becomes interesting in this project. In both projects we’ve been working for the same customer. The customer has a new hardware device in the pipeline, which will be used primarily as an interface device for cloud connectivity and connections to other software. For this purpose, I have been setting up a test automation system for the last few months. Now the idea is to move the service application to this new hardware as well. Of course, it is very beneficial that I have already been able to build up some knowledge about this device.
So we had a lot of meetings on this topic. We also got some hardware that had to be set up. I also got my first glimpses into the backend of the service application project. During my time as a student, I mainly worked on frontend projects.
I wrote a powershell script to start multiple services at once for more development comfort
Also at the beginning of the month in the project change phase, I had some time and wrote a small tool. I created a Powershell script that is configurable via a JSON file. The script allows developers to save configurations and commands to start different utilities and combine them into execution groups. This way all services needed for local development can be started with just one click instead of manually opening multiple terminals to run the services.
Support for my previous test automation project
I already mentioned the project I had been working on for the last months. The test automation is ready so far that the first test cases can be created. I mainly built the system, but the writing of the test cases is now done by other people. Additionally some new functionalities will be added, for example the support of websocket connections. Since I have most knowledge of the project, I’ve been doing a lot of support work for the testcases this month, as well as helping out other developers when they have problems implementing certain things in the context of this project. Especially setting up a websocket connection with Python and running this websocket connection asynchronously so that the tests don’t block took us some time. I also finished my last own task for the project and created new run-scripts for the tests. With this, it is now possible to pass more options to the tests on Linux and Windows, using shell scripts and Powershell scripts.
I deleted 25,000 lines of code from an active project
I was cleaning up a large project at my other workplace and found a lot of lines of code and whole files that are not used in the project. I think it is self-explanatory why it makes sense to remove unused code from a project. Unused code increases the complexity of an application without providing any benefits. In my case, it was a C# dotnet project I was working on. In the files I looked at there were individual classes specified. So I was able to do quite easy searches across all project files and see if this class is instantiated at any point. If a class is never instantiated and there are no class variables to access, then I can be very sure that this code is not in use. So I got rid of it. In the end, it all added up to about 25,000 lines of code. Crazy. Of course, we still have to check intensively whether I have done everything right.
Web presence & private projects
Started working on my Netflix Analyzer
I wrote a small Python script years ago that interpreted my Netflix title history from a csv file. It was capable of giving me some very simple charts about my watchtime. Now I found out that you can download all your personal data from Netflix. This is a much more comprehensive data set. For example, the exact watch times are listed, so that you can calculate exactly when you watched how long on Netflix. Statistics by day of the week, time of day, etc. are possible now with this new dataset. I started to write a Netflix analyzer integrated in my Gatsby.js website, that can read and process this data. Most of the work is done in javascript. So far the analyzer can read the zip file, read the user profiles on the account and provide them for selection. It can also calculate the watchtime per year for a profile and display it in a chart with chart.js. The project is still in progress. I would like to offer this as a service for everyone. Surely there are more statistics junkies here who are interested in dumping their Netflix viewing data in this tool.
Crazy increase of my reach on Instagram.
At the end of last month, I committed to be more active on social media again. I continued to accomplish it this month and the results were impressive. In total, I reached over half a million accounts on Instagram with my posts in February. A total of 1700 new followers joined my account in this month. My posts got 14,500 likes, have been commented over 100 times and saved 2900 times. All of this just in February. I think I do not have to say much more. But of course these numbers motivate me a lot to keep posting things on social media. I’m excited about the number of new people I’ve come in contact with this month and how many have finally found their way to my website.
Blog post about adding an RSS feed to my website
This month I once again wrote a post for my blog. Yeahi. So another one besides the flashback for January. I added a RSS feed to my website, which I had developed with Gatsby.js (yes I know, now it’s WordPress again that runs my website – that changes every few days for me this year). Besides the implementation I wrote the article about it. It was nice to work like this and in the future I’d like to write about more topics I’m dealing with and publish the texts on my blog. You can find the Blogpost here: Add an RSS Feed to my gatsby.js website
Continued work on the Flutter app from the weekend hackathon last month
Last month I was proud to tell you about a private weekend hackathon i did with a friend. This month I can report that the project is not completely dead and we sat down together for another day to work on the project. What did we get done last month? We wrote an app using Flutter where a small personal database of things can be created. We then included two API’s so you can additionally scan barcodes and automatically add food in the fridge to the database, for example. This time we didn’t make any big progress, but dealt with a lot of meta issues. Our app got a new name and is now called Stuffly, it can be seen as a kind of highly simplified inventory software for private users or even small stores. We also worked on a few more features that we consider essential and fixed a lot of bugs that we noticed last time. I am curious how the project will proceed. After we have worked very intensively on it for another day, the project is lying around again for the moment.
Miscellaneous
Corona in the apartment
I live in a shared flat with four other people. This month it happened and we had taken Corona into the rooms. Of course we had to be careful that we isolate ourselves from our positive roommate and do some shopping for him. However, it has caught none of us in the course. In any case, it was also an exciting week.
I ordered a few books on programming topics.
With my long work week, my own projects, social media and computer games, I sit in front of the screen a lot. This month I had a few days where I just wanted to get away from it. However, I still wanted to get more into software development topics. The easiest solution I came up with was the following: I just ordered a bunch of handbooks. A thick book about C#, one about Docker, one about Angular and also one about Javascript. Such handbooks are usually rather expensive, but I bought them second-hand, which lowered the price a bit. Let’s see if I will sit down from time to time and look up individual topics in the manuals instead of using my browser in the future.
That’s it for February. I hope you had a good month. And with this I leave directly a reminder to myself that I also want to write a flashback for March. See you next month or in another blog post. Thanks for reading.