What I Done Did In April
Stuck at home all month so not much!
Played a lot of Animal Crossing
I probably put about 120 hours into Animal Crossing this month, I’ve paid off all the mortgages and completed all the Bunny Day event items but unfortunately I wasn’t able to also complete the blossom items (next year though!).
I’ve really been enjoying the game and have almost got all the fossils (only two left to go) and I’m about 70% through getting all the KK Songs and with new content being released I think it’s safe to say the game will continue to keep everyones attention for the coming months.
Started on my app idea
For the last six or so years I’ve been wanting to build an app to help people with their resumes, having spent some time myself looking for work and realising some of the short falls of maintaining these documents.
I have an idea of who I think will make a good user base and in order to validate that idea I decided to create a survey in order to collect this user base’s needs and wants around the subject.
From what I’ve seen of the feedback so far, my initial idea isn’t as strong as one of the other ideas I was looking to explore so it’s a good thing I made the survey, otherwise I’d have invested my time in the wrong area.
Bought a standing desk
In one of my previous jobs we had standing desks and it was great (once you got past the initial aches), I’ve been wanting to go back to a standing desk for a while and have invested in a Deskmate cardboard desk in the past.
While the Deskmate is good, it can be a nuisance to put up and take down throughout the day as you want to sit and stand, plus mines got a bit of discolouring due to the material being cardboard.
So when I saw that Autonomous had a sale on I decided to dive into buying a proper standing desk and it’s a much better set up than I had previously as the desk has buttons to move it up and down and a bunch of presets that allows different heights to be saved.
One of the things that I’ve found since getting the desk is that my initial heights were too low and I started to get aches due to bending over too much. Additionally, I now have got so used to standing that sitting too much can get annoying.
As I’m now working from home and I’m unable to get out as much as I’d normally be doing the desk has been a good means of getting out of the sedentary monotony of being confined to my flat.
Watched Gravity Falls
We ended up getting Disney+ and while my girlfriend is enjoying watching all the old Disney shows she used to watch as a kid (it’s been fun looking at early 00’s fashion in those shows).
One of the shows that I was interested in watching was Gravity Falls, as it looked like the kind of thing I’m into, with cryptids and the like.
The show was OK and had some funny moments but it was nowhere near as dark as I was hoping for. I guess as a 90’s kid I’m used to things like Tales From The Cryptkeeper, Round The Twist and Are You Afraid Of The Dark? (the red water monster episode really messed me up as a kid).
Start building an API with Pact
While I’m waiting for the survey for my app idea to be completed by enough people, I started on building a basic CRUD API to handle resumes in the FRESH format I wrote about previously.
In order to test the API I decided to use Pact as I’ve heard about it at various conference talks and this new project was a good excuse to dive into consumer-driven contract testing.
I designed the API in Swagger first because I find OpenAPI documents a good way of ‘sketching out’ the API before committing to it and then started building the consumer.
The consumer tests were built using Axios and then I used Pact to create the contract tests for the consumer, then once that pact was uploaded to Pactflow I then used that pact to verify the API as I built it.
I really like Pact and will do a detailed tutorial in the next coming weeks as it’s a powerful tool, especially as you’re building a micro-service based solution.
