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Weekly Recap, 1530, Speaking at Rubyconf, Walking from Cubao to BGC.
On the 1530th week of my life, I:
- Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Everyday, by Todd Henry.
- The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, By Charles Duhigg.
- Reading: Domain-Driven Design by Eric J. Evans. Nearly finished, I hope!
- Reading: Full Stack React.
- Watching: A Cloud Guru AWS Software Architect Online Course.
- Writing: A blog post on how I use the Pomodoro technique.
- Biked: 90km.
- Walked: Cubao to BGC.
Spoke at Rubyconf Philippines! Yeah!
Coding:
- Ruby/Rails: I just said “f it” and got Transcripto up to a workable state re: reading talks. I just need to deploy it. It’s not so easy to deploy to Heroku anymore, so now I’m definitely going to use AWS for my deploys.
- Elixir/Phoenix: Got Habits Two to a point where I can add Habits. It’s really hard to transition to Ecto from ActiveRecord, but only because they’re two different libraries. Ecto is “granularly add functionality.” AR is “here’s everything you need.”
- I also sucked it up and really moved forward with React, I’m about 2 or 3 chapters from Redux. I want to get to Redux first before I integrate and create the front-end for the Daryllxd app. I actually get how it works now, I just need to put some reps and look at the framework. You probably notice that I love frameworks. I don’t love reinventing the wheel.
Speaking at RubyconfPH
This whole week started off with me still coding, but at the middle of the week, things really went to Rubyconf mode. To be completely honest, I’m not scared of speaking in front of a hundred people. I just look at the front of the room anyways. I just remember that I can speak to anyone, and it’s like I’m speaking to one hundred people one hundred times.
I am scared though of my filler words during the talk. Because of that, I wrote everything down on the slide notes. While that solves the problem of filler words, you don’t want to be reading everything off the slides. I abandoned reading the slides midway through the presentation.
While I practiced the material tons of times on my own, I didn’t practice actually standing up and giving the talk. So I went over the limit. Lesson learned. Practice more and more and practice everything.
Overall, I’m happy with the result. Not to toot my own horn but I objectively think the talk was okay. I’ve had a few people tell me that they liked it and they got something from it. I saw a few people taking photos of the slides, and one of the people I look up to in the Philippine Ruby community chatted with me on Twitter about it. Oh well, that’s done! Yay!
Being at RubyConfPH
I’ve been to all five RubyConfPHs. It’s mirrored my Rails developer progress, seeing as I didn’t even have a job when I went to the first one. For the next three iterations, I was a Sourcepad employee. In this fifth edition, I came (walked in? 😂) as a speaker.
It’s an active benchmark of my current skills against other people taking the same journey as I am. It reminds me of “oh yeah, I should probably be applying myself more”. I also like that I slowly get to understand the talks year by year. Progress!
I think of web development shops as middle-age guilds, and RubyConfPH as the annual guild meeting: the different Ruby companies all meet up at one place to talk about their craft. And honestly, I thought the whole “Ruby programmers are nice” was just a buzz phrase, but as I’ve spoken with tens of them throughout the years, it’s actually true. I really like chatting and making new friends with fellow Rubyists.
Tidbits:
- I’ve been really listening to “In Motion” (The Social Network OST) lately. It’s started to replace “Music for 18 Musicians” as my song of choice while coding. I wrote the core of my Rubyconf talk to that music.
- I’ve also concretized a new idea that isn’t completely new. I’m currently using it every time I’m too shy to put my work out there. It’s called the “One Fucker” effect. I got this from Gary Vaynerchuk in his video. It’s around the five minute mark. “I’m willing to sit here and make this video, hoping that one fucker, one fucker says, ‘oh shit’.” So yeah. If I come across or create something that I believe can genuinely improve someone else’s life, why the hell shouldn’t I share it?
- It was my last week of the Base Training II program for my bike. Yeah progress! I wasn’t able to actually bike that much at the end, but I was able to sort-of finish 8 weeks of training. I’ll begin a new training program this week.