Welcome back!
Remember couple months ago when I showed you a thing I had been working on - learning how to write iOS apps in SwiftUI? Well, I’m back for more, with progress!
Colors! Fun icons!
Charts! Oh my!
I’m still learning all the ins and outs of good layout, and frankly, I don’t even know a fraction of what’s possible yet. More to come!
In which your intrepid host embarks on a Grand Canyon adventure.
Read MoreHey all! Coming to you today from Phoenix, AZ, land of cacti, taupe stucco and suburban sprawl! It’s actually a rather pleasant 90 degrees right now (1% humidity), at 6 pm. It really is a dry heat.
Tomorrow begins the culmination of what I’ve been training for since February, with only a slight alteration due to a trail closure, which is a one-day rim-to-river-to-rim hike in the Grand Canyon. Our initial plan had been to start at the South Rim of the canyon, hike down to the river, then cross and hike to the North Rim, a total distance of around 21 miles. Due to some rockslides over the winter, however, the top section of the trail to the north side is closed, so we are instead going to be hiking down from the south side via the South Kaibab trail, down to the river, then back up to the same south side via the Bright Angel trail, for a total distance of around 19 miles (and ~3500 feet of elevation gain). Wish me luck!
There will be lots more to come, as the summer adventures won’t end there, so stay tuned!
I’m trying to form new habits, cultivating things that make me happier, more satisfied, and culling the things that don’t anymore. A kind of Marie Kondo, but for feelings instead of things.
My employer has a mission statement to “improve the quality of life,” which is really a great mission statement to have, especially for a software company. One of the ways they back up that mission is by investing in their employees’ mental health and well-being. For several years now, we’ve been able to take part in sessions with a mindfulness coach. In the beginning, it was pretty clear that the original goal was trying to keep people prepared for the daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly “hero’s journey” that everyone in a tech startup has to go through to keep the company moving forward and growing. But, somewhere along the way, at least for the group sessions I’ve been a part of, the focus shifted away from optimizing for mental performance, to a focus on more general positive well-being; gratitude, meditation, and breathing exercise as a way of reducing stress, increasing calm and focus.
One of the things I’ve been doing is trying to snap a photo everyday, and posting a weekly summary on my instagram account. When I succeed, it helps me remember that there’s something everyday, however small, that’s worth capturing.
In a similar vein, I’m starting up a journal, with the intention of capturing the things I’m grateful for everyday, and another way of noticing life.
This little site here is another thing, I’m not promising to post everyday, or anything crazy like that, but I do hope to pay a little more attention to these pages and update them a little more frequently.
So, here”s to trying new things.
At some point during the winter, I thought to myself, I wish I could do [x] on my phone, and, in a departure from norm, I didn’t go searching in the App Store, but rather thought, I bet I could make that. And so, for the past several months, I’ve been working my way through a course on SwiftUI development from the website Hacking With Swift (the misuse of the term “hacking” aside, the website is terrific!).
The course I’ve been following leads through programming fundamentals for iOS by building small sample apps, which not only is a great way to see how apps come together, but gives you a library of examples that you can quite literally copy-and-paste from when it comes time to build something new. I’m getting close to the end of the course, and I am champing at the bit to start building my idea. So I started.
I’m not gonna tell you what the whole idea is, but SPOILER ALERT it involves gathering data from Apple’s Health app - the place where various health and fitness related apps can read and share data. Apple provides a means of interacting with the Health app, an API in nerd-speak, called HealthKit. Over the weekend, I was finally able to send a request for data through HealthKit and received data in my app! This is a big deal for me!
Real, actual data!
Yeah, it’s ugly. But, it’s a major step, as workout information is at the core of what I want to do with this app. I don’t know if I will ever get to the point where I put this in the App Store for others to use, but if it proves to be functional and useful, I probably will! So, hopefully, much more to come!
I’ve got a couple of my guitars - my acoustic and my trusty ol’ Squire Stratocaster - tuned to an open tuning that I had never used before; open F. I had it this way to learn how to play Soul Singing by the Black Crowes, off their Lions record. Good song, always gets stuck in my head. Anyway, it’s kind of a pain in the ass to go back and forth between a tuning like Open C and standard (the notes of the open strings are so far apart, the notes will drift out of tune), so I was strumming around, coming up with interesting chords and sounds. And, I ended up making something.
Hope you like it! If you feel like it, let me know what it evokes for you. I don’t currently have any plans for it, but maybe it could evolve into something else.
More to come. ?
Ho ho ho, folks!
Been missing from this place for a bit – things were quite busy at work heading into the end of the year, but that’s nothing new or surprising for anyone.
Anyway, I was going through some old songs on my computer this morning, and came across a Christmas song I wrote a long, LONG time ago, back in LA… maybe a year after I got married? I can’t remember. Anyway, I never did much with it beyond a rough draft, and I do mean rough. But, I always liked it. I decided that, with some of the great software I now have at my disposal that I didn’t have before, I’d polish it up a little, and put it out into the world. So, here it is:
I hope you enjoy, and have a great holiday!
Naming things is hard. It’s what every programmer knows, and it’s why this post has a terrible title. Anyway…
I put up a PR today that touched 94 files. I apologized to my fellow devs who had to do a code review. While people were reviewing that monster, I was writing end-to-end tests. I guess it all equals out in the end.
I don’t know about you, but weekends tend to just be two days out of seven that I don’t go to the office. Now, that’s not to say that I’m working on “work,” as in the things that I get paid to do, but I’m certainly not not working.
This weekend it’s all about trying to get the bathroom my kids use back up into working order. Notice I’m not saying finished. The goal for the end of today is to get the floor in, so I can put the toilet back in.
What do you have going on this weekend? What’s your goal?
What’s the best thing that could happen this weekend?
Hey everybody. I’m gonna be trying something new here. Stay tuned.
Welcome to 2019, everybody!
I think there’s something to the concept of “momentum” in life. There was a lot, both good and bad, about 2018, but what is definite is that it had some weird energy on the way out. One of my goals for 2019, in addition to writing more here, is to reset the energy and get that momentum heading back in a positive direction. I certainly bombed out on my fitness regimen the last two weeks of the year, so I definitely have to get back to work on that.
Speaking of work, things have been great for me on that front, and I see no reason for that not to continue. I definitely had a stressful end to the year, trying to push a major rewrite of an old section of code in our app, but I didn’t get it wrapped up before vacation, so it’s going to be full steam ahead on getting that task wrapped up before moving into our first release of 2019.
So, with a little luck and good grace, there will be lots more to come. I know the focus of the writing here will take on subjects that were not foreseen when I started this site, but I hope will have some value for somebody at some point. Thanks for reading.
Hello, dear reader! It’s been a minute since I last posted here, and life continues on at its usual breakneck pace. I just wanted to put a little happiness and gratitude out into the world, and say happy holidays! More to come soon…
Ah, crap. I can't believe it's been more than a year since I posted here.
So, a RECAP!
When last I left you, dear reader, I was deeply embroiled in coding bootcamp at The Iron Yard Indianapolis. The good news: I successfully completed the course there, and on September 11th, began a 3-month on-the-job-training stint with Greenlight Guru, a local cloud software (SaaS - or Software as a Service) company. Huzzah! Successful career transition underway!
I completed my internship (in name only) at Greenlight, and was brought on as a full-fledged Full Stack - Front End Developer on their dev team. Huzzah! Career transition successful! It's been quite an trip so far. GG uses Ember as their front-end framework, which is quite a bit different from the React projects I had been building at the Iron Yard. But, since they're both built on top of Javascript, it just took a bit of time to become accustomed to the conventions and behavior of writing Ember applications, and now I feel like a productive, contributing member of the development team.
It was also around this time when I was contacted by my friends from Indiana Repertory Theater (remember way back when I was a sound engineer?), with the news that they had secured the funding and rights to edit and broadcast Finding Home: Indiana At 200 on the local public station WFYI. Since I had done the FOH mixing and recording, I would handle the editing and mixing of the audio to the final broadcast video. Hey, cool! The show was broadcast in December on WFYI.
Oh, did I also mention that IRT also hired me to sound design their production of The Originalist? An interesting play about Supreme Court Justice Scalia, and directed by the always wonderful James Still, it was a nice deviation back into the theater world.
Time passes, life proceeds at the usual break-neck speed.
Then, I get word that WFYI has submitted Finding Home to the regional EMMY awards for several categories, including Sound. Then, I get word that Finding Home won a Lower Great Lakes Chapter Regional EMMY Award for Sound!
WAT?
A real-live Emmy award!
Yeah, so that happened!
So, as I said, life continues on unabated, the kids are starting school in a week and 1/2, Mary is quitting her job as a social worker to start an in-home daycare, and I'm still coding Ember at Greenlight, and developing a full-stack side-project for the old college buddies in React, NodeJS, Apollo/GraphQL, just to keep my skillz in various technologies as up-to-date as possible.
How's things with you?
Okay, I've been neglecting my posting duties for a while here, so let's do a little recap. Since the last time I posted after week 4, I spent a weekend with my kids at my folks' place in MI, spent a weekend working in Bloomington, IN with good friend Jonathan Snipes, and of course, last weekend was the time to celebrate the Fourth of July. In the meantime, I've been adding repos to my GitHub like a madman.
red is bad
So, here I am, one week from wrapping up the "Back-End Fundamentals" portion, with 3 weeks of Node.js, databases (SQL and MongoDB) and various packages and frameworks under my belt. Looking forward to moving into React, and getting back to Front-End Dev.
So today in my coding bootcamp adventure, we started into "Back-End Fundamentals" of web development. The new format for the Web Development course at the Iron Yard is meant to give all graduates a shot at both front- and back-end development, both to give us a chance to evaluate what we want to focus on with the last month of our training, and also to send us out into the job market with at least a foundation in both areas, regardless of our chosen specialty. We're gone headfirst into Node.js, which allows us to continue working in JavaScript and honing our understanding of that language.
I must say that, for now at least, I'm still intending on focusing on front-end dev. We'll see how this section on Node.js goes, but the projects we did for the first four weeks of class were fun to tackle, and making things look like mock-ups is a fun puzzle for me. Again, we'll see, but the thought of learning React and REACT Native sounds exciting. More to come!
So, it's hump day of my third week of code school bootcamp, and ma synapses are burnin'. Week 3 day 3 corresponds to our third day of JavaScript, and this class is rapidly burning through the pre-learning that I've managed to accumulate through years of poking my nose into books, tutorials, free "crash courses" and digging through source code for snippets I could "borrow" for my own projects.
I do catch some flack in school for being ahead of the curve compared to a lot of people in the class, but I know it's coming from the stress everybody is under, trying to make sense of all this information that's being hurled our way. I know I would feel the same way were I in their shoes. And, it won't be long until I'm in territory just as new to me as it is to them. After all, we'll be starting Ruby in a week and 1/2.
In the meantime, I try to help out as much as I can, explaining logic and syntax for things I have a good handle on. Often, I find myself talking my way into a better or more efficient way of coding a particular solution than the one that I had already written in my own code.
Okay, time for a nightcap.
Writing now from near the end of week 2 of my Iron Yard coding boot camp, and I'm kinda feeling like this dude:
TFW you've been coding for 9 days straight...
My sister asked me how class was going, and I replied "My brain is getting fuller every day!", and that's kinda how it feels. We've been speeding through HTML, CSS, command-line usage, flexbox, and HTML forms, and we've only had 9 classes! In the next 2 weeks we'll be getting into javascript, and after that it'll be on to back-end developing with Ruby.
More to come...
Welcome back, folks. Today I'm starting a new project, which is upgrading my self. Today was my first day at The Iron Yard, a code school here in Indianapolis. The Iron Yard has campuses around the country, but in Indy I'm enrolled in the Web Development Career Path course, where, in 12 weeks, I hope to come out the other end with the skills to land a job in web development.
Now, I know what some of you are thinking: Jason, you have a website! I'm reading it right now! Why the hell do you need a class?!?
Well, to be honest, right now Squarespace is doing the heavy lifting for this site. I type things in boxes and click this and that, and poof! these pages appear. Nobody is going to hire me to design their website in Squarespace. Not for any kind of meaningful salary, anyway. So, here I am! Picking up a new hustle.
Today was all about brushing up on some fundamentals, getting comfy with Terminal and the command line, and getting to know my fellow students. Everyone is really on board, helping each other out, and I get the feeling we'll all have each other's backs for the next three months and on.
More news as news develops! Thanks for stopping by.
So I've got a little bit of downtime between the end of my contract at IRT and the start of the next chapter in my life (more on that soon...), so here I present, on a Tuesday, a song I recorded on Monday, in the style of The Sundays:
If you don't know the original version, you should go listen to it. It's a beautiful song. I've been practicing acoustic guitar finger picking for a while now, in an attempt to get better, and this is one of the songs I practice. One day, I was having a case of FAT FINGERS while practicing, and so I decided to switch up the style of the song, so it could be strummed. Anyway, I kinda liked it, so yesterday morning I whipped up this track in Logic Pro X. I mastered it this morning, and here it is. Enjoy.
