Already last year I realized that publishing content online has many advantages and opens up new possibilities. But the most important thing to publishing any content is to establish a writing and publishing habit. For this purpose, I’m trying to publish a regular monthly flashback, in which I’ll summarize some highlights of my month. So the plan is, that there is at least one post for each month. Let’s see how long I can keep this up.
So here are my most interesting stories from the month of January 2022 in a short summary:
Work
First client presentation in English
For one of the projects at work this month we had a presentation for the client. The application we wrote for him was explained and a live demo was presented. Since this time there were people from other departments of the client who are not speaking German, this review was held in English. In a professional work environment, it was my first English presentation for a client. I led through the live demo and everything went very well.
End of the gateway project
I have been working on the ‘gateway project’ since last year. We developed a system for test automation to test a customer’s device. This device can be connected to other devices of the customer to pass data for external software via a WebAPI. The project expires at the end of January. Besides the presentation I already mentioned, there were other remaining tasks. First, we had some problems with this device and we spent a lot of time with different test scenarios and error analyses because we didn’t know if the device or our test system was the cause of the errors. I also redesigned the file and code structure in the project together with our technical Lead and wrote the documentation for it. This was very interesting since it was more on a software architecture level. Besides this, there were some other development tasks and calls to set up the development environment on other people’s machines.
Signed working time adjustment
I have worked two jobs since last year. Together these have come to 40 hours per week. One is my main job and the other is a side job. Until this month the distribution was 28 hours and 12 hours. Especially in hot project phases, I had problems with this. A working time of 28 hours means three and a half days. When everything is on fire, important tasks are still open or meetings are pending, it’s hard to fit in that half day and just leave. So I signed a contract amendment to increase my working hours from 28 hours to 32 hours to be present for four full days at my main job. This is easier to coordinate and I can now just clearly say “I’m not there on Fridays”. Since I didn’t reduce the working hours at my other job, it also means that I now have a 44 hour workweek.
Shell scripts for Gitlab updates
At one of my workplaces, we use a self-hosted Gitlab instance to manage the source code of our applications. This instance has been set up recently via Docker. Previously, git was not used for version management in this company. Since Gitlab gets updates on a regular basis and they should be applied, I took care of writing shell scripts that can be executed on the server to update Gitlab.
Code refactoring for view handling
At my side job, I was doing some code refactoring. An application that runs in the context of a warehouse management system on devices in the warehouse has a relatively complicated state and view management in the code. This application is already older and has grown over a long time and is definitely not the most modern in terms of its code. However, by some simple adaptations, the number of code lines for the view handling could be drastically reduced.
Web presence & private projects
Redevelopment of my personal website You can see it because you are probably reading this post on my website right now. I previously ran my website on WordPress. That was too boring for me. What am I a software developer for if I can’t write my own website? So I dumped the WordPress site and looked around for alternatives. In the end, I wrote this site with gatsby.js based on a gatsby starter template in one week and rolled it out.
Private Flutter Hackathon
I did a little private Hackathon together with a friend of mine. During my time at university, I have often implemented projects for the university and also privately a few games together with this friend. We had the urge to code something together again, so we spent a free weekend with a little project. We didn’t have a plan for what we were going to build at the start of the weekend. After a short brainstorming phase, we had an idea. By the end of the weekend, we had written an app with Flutter for Android and iOS under the working name FoodStock. In this app, you can track mainly food, but also everything else you have floating around at home. In addition to the normal list view, add dialogs, and database functionality, we implemented a barcode scanner and access to a free API to scan food via camera and check for its name. Unfortunately, we haven’t published anything from this project yet, because we still have some open items that we couldn’t finish in time during that weekend.
Second month of codersquestions posts
In December last year, I decided to post answers to questions from my everyday life as a software developer under the name codersquestions. After the break over Christmas and New Year, I managed to publish five new codersquestions posts this month. Recently these posts are not only available on the codersquestions Instagram account, there is also an extra section for it here on my newly built website, where I uploaded all codersquestions posts.
Miscellaneous
Exmatriculated from university
I had graduated from university with my computer science bachelor’s degree last year. The bachelor thesis was already finished at the beginning of 2021. Then only one last exam was left, which I passed in the summer semester. Since I had not yet received my mark by the start of the winter semester, I had signed up for this running semester. The mark had already been confirmed last year and now I have submitted and received confirmation of my de-registration from the university at the end of the winter semester. So the chapter student is closed.
Bought an iPhone
I’ve been an Android user since I owned my first smartphone. I also have a Macbook and an iPad, but with my phone, I have always remained an Android user. Most recently I bought a OnePlus 6 in early 2018 and have been using it until last week. Before the OnePlus 6, I bought a new phone fairly regularly every two years. This time, I’ve held out longer. But especially the battery life has at some point dropped noticeably and I was just in the mood for something new. I briefly considered buying a Pixel 6, but somehow none of the current Android smartphones really caught me. So I bought a used iPhone 11 to finally try out iOS and to be able to judge it.
Good reading habit
I also read a lot last year, but this year there were some small changes I noticed. I bought non-fiction books on the go and started reading them when I had questions or thoughts about a topic. It was not important to me to choose great books beforehand and do big research on my next non-fiction book. I have also read some short books of 100-200 pages by lesser known authors as a result. In total, I’ve already read through five books this year (cheating a bit on one because I was 80% done with it by December). Currently I’m still actively reading two books. One novel and one non-fiction book. I really like having one of each type in progress at all times.
Peaked into Rocket League’s Champion rank
The absolutely most important thing at the end. One of the only games I’ve ever played online ranked is Rocket League. When you get right down to it, it’s also the only game I play at all on a semi-regular basis. In the last season, I’ve already joined diamond rank in various game modes. Recently I played a long session 3vs3 with two friends and for the first time, I have seen a champion symbol in front of my rank. I think I can now call myself an absolutely professional Rocket League player.
Thanks for reading this monthly flashback. This was the very first of its kind. If there are any comments you want to share, just drop me a line on Instagram or Twitter or an email or whatever. And then keep your fingers crossed that I follow through with what I’ve set out to do and write another little review next month. Have a nice February.