What I done did in January 2020
It’s my birthday month so aside from contemplating how old I’ve become, here’s what I’ve been up to.
Got old
It was my birthday on the 12th and I turned 32. The day was pretty good as I spent it down the pub playing Pokemon Sword and Shield with my girlfriend, my mate and his dog.
One thing I found this year was that it took about 3 pubs in Leeds centre to actually find one that was open as most were closed for refurb or closing at 4pm.
Started learning how to silkscreen print
One of the birthday presents I bought myself was a 5 week silkscreen printing course where they teach how to silkscreen print onto paper at the Leeds Printing Workshop.
It was part birthday present and part investment as I want to create a side hustle for myself creating silkscreen prints of gameboy screens.
It’s a great course and I’m learning a lot about the process as well as being able to experiment with different techniques (i.e. dick about).
Did a lot of React Native development
In mid December before I went on my Christmas break I was asked to build an app in React Native with an aim to get it launched by the end of January.
I decided in order to speed up the development of the app I’d use Expo, a tool I really enjoyed while building my component library.
Expo really made the process easy as I could combine expo build:ios and expo upload:ios in a CI pipeline and get an app in people’s hands within a matter of hours.
I then built the app using redux-saga which is always great and used event channels to handle the push notifications the app uses.
All in all it was a great experience building the app and I look forward to the extra bits we build on top of it.
One of the good things about the project was that it made me realise that I really enjoy developing apps, but my day job does not give me that enjoyment, it’s probably something I need to think about at some point.
Got people to think about talking
This month’s ministry of testing meet-up in Leeds was about getting into talking. We had a great introduction to giving high impact talks from Nat and then I followed up by showing everyone the exact opposite of what she said.
The attendants then broke out into a workshop where they wrote bios of themselves and took ideas from those and turned them into talk ideas that they could give in a couple months time.
It was a really good exercise and I look forward to seeing what people present.
