Preparing for Short Talks = Harder Than It Sounds

Preparing

My talk was a bit more difficult than I had thought it would be. Trying to cram all of the knowledge that I wanted to share into a 10 minute time window was very difficult. I would certainly choose a less technical, and more of just a showy talk subject for a 5-10 window "lightning" talk.

The good news, was that the other speaker didn't show up so what ended up happening was I got the chance to talk about Vim and Tmux for about 45 minutes which was awesome! I went into a lot more detail, and answered a lot of questions as well.

Progress

I didn't get QUITE as far in my website as I had wanted to yesterday. It felt like I really didn't make a large amount of progress in terms of pomodoros in general. Honestly, with my schedule shift and having the 6-7 hours in the morning I have been quite productive and able to get a lot done without needing the 2 full days off. I don't feel terrible about not getting 12 hours of pure progress done, but I would like to get a day where I can pull that off.

I met with Sashi with LeagueJunkies and he gave me an overview of the website, and the technology being used to run it. It is way more involved than I had first thought, as he is essentially building Facebook for League of Legends players. It will be interesting to try and refactor tests into a completely untested code base, especially since I have yet to do a full project of my own with testing. I'll be focusing on as much TDD learning in the coming weeks as I can squeeze in.

For my personal website, things are pretty much coming together. I've finally gotten the framing complete. Next I'll have to focus on getting my typography and color scheme the way that I want it. There is still a good amount left to do after that, such as small tweaks to sizing, various features I want for my blog, and overall polish. Oh, and let's not forgot making sure everything is fully responsive for viewing on different screens!

I wrote my first actual article for the blog today, in order to coincide with the talk I did last night. It is a list of advice for learning Vim and some resources that I used in order to gain competence as well as links to setup and my dotfiles that I finally got backed up today with RCM.

Need more podcasts!

I am getting to the point where I have no more podcasts to listen to. So far I have listened to every single Ruby Rogues, Code Newbies, Entreprogrammers, Ruby 5, and a very large majority of The Freelancers show, Javascript Jabber. I still have a fair amount of Giant Robots podcast to go through however after that I am not familiar with any other really high quality ones to listen to so I'll have to do some research on that.

Going forward

Overall, I'm happy with my progress while at the same time I am very impatient on moving into my next role. Hopefully with all of the work I am doing to follow best practices I'll be able to slide into a great company that emulates that so I can learn quickly over the next year or two.

That's it for today, see you on Sunday!