2018

As is custom, at the end or start of year I share my goals and progress as we close and open new chapters. I don’t think there’s an actual chapter closed or opened, it’s comforting to think about it that way but i think life is a continuos stream of … life events that ultimately define our entire existence, there is no break. None. Whatever it may look like, it is a continuation. It’s a mere formality then to state that the last year and all that took place had been a long time coming, whether we acknowledge it or not.

Comparing what my aims were at the end of 2017 and now, I cannot help but feel like I am no longer as open with some of my ideas, goals etc. The reasons behind that are not quite apparent to me, but going through last year’s post I even marvelled at how much I shared about my life and where I intended to go. I sure do hope to investigate my reasons for initially defaulting to scraping the surface with this blog post.

Recent takeaways from pairing

A couple of weeks ago, my workmate paid a visit to Harare from his place in Cape Town for some pair programming, again (yay!). After having had a head start in coding a web app for a mobile application (built with Xamarin), the objective was to quickly knock it into shape and ship it out. I had chosen VueJS for the frontend (because it’s awesome), supported by an API in Laravel - to maintain consistency with the mobile app, we wanted everything to remain exactly the same. During the time of pairing, I learned even more lessons than the other times when I have paired with other programmers.

Working time

For the past few weeks, actually since the start of the year, i’ve experienced the most turbulent of times in terms of my daily schedule. Really i wish I was Cerberus, or could teleport to Mars and have slightly longer days. I’ve been under massive, gargantuan pressure to code, exercise, plan, reply emails and continue being a human who’s not a joker.

How to add your own executable scripts to bash

I have been enjoying the book Effective Engineer by Edmond Lau. One of the great tricks of becoming more effective is to set workflows that make you do more, much faster. I have ended up setting a few scripts to automate a lot of bash commands such as ssh-ing, using git etcetera and in this short primer i’d love to show total newbies how to have your own executable scripts from any place on your system.

The first thing to note here is Mac OS has a few candidate files in your home folder that it indexes for commands to use in every bash window. On my system, I prefer to use ~/.bash_rc mainly because it is loaded up when a new instance of a terminal window is opened compared to ~/.bash_profile which is loaded up at login.

2016 review and what's next

I almost always set goals for the year. In 2016 I had a bunch of goals and I think it’s fair to say I achieved about 50% of them, which has me beaming! I came to the comforting conclusion about two years ago that I’m in a marathon and my prophetic powers being what they’re (non-existant), estimating time is tough but I sure as hell have an idea about my direction. With that out of the way, here’s how my 2016 turned out to be:

• I started working with the incredible folks at Onesheep.org. This is arguably the best bunch of people i’ve come across!
• I participated in the C4K Hackathon and our team came an impressive second. Yay