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August 2024
- I continue work on the modernization of a student loan application for a Canadian provincial government. The project is a .NET Blazor server application, so I've been continuing my journey working full stack in C#.
- Celebrated my in-laws' 50th wedding anniversary, and our own 10th wedding anniversary.
- Celebrated my best friend's 40th birthday with a nice dinner at Grey Gardens, a gem of a restaurant tucked away in Kensington Market.
- Celebrated my dad and niece's birthdays (a lot of celebrations this month!)
- Spent some time in the Kawartha Lakes region visiting my parents.
- Started reading A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout. It's very good, and very applicable to me now that I'm working in a C# codebase. I wish a book like this existed earlier in my career. Will post a more in-depth review about it later.
- Started renting a new studio space for work. Enjoying it so far.
- Started preparations for Brew Tour 2024.
- My monthly playlist for August 2024.
July 2024
- Work: I continue work on the modernization of a student loan application for a Canadian provincial government. The project is a .NET Blazor server application, so I've been continuing my journey developing in C#. Enjoying it.
- Website: I added a new Fragments and Photos section to my website.
- Lots of visits with friends and family.
- My monthly playlist for July
June 2024
- Another busy month at work. We pushed through some features that involved giving our users more views of their data.
- Lots of social visits with family and friends. Summer social calendar is in full swing. I have a love / hate relationship with this time of year. Love the weather. Love seeing some folks. Hate feeling like every weekend is claimed for a social activity. We introverts need a bit more downtime.
- Will be travelling to Hong Kong / China / Japan later this year, so started some planning for that. Feeling excited!
- These were the songs I listened to in June.
May 2024
- A month of work, mostly. I'm still working for a Canadian provincial government on a set of Blazor server applications. We passed a big feature milestone and are now moving on to some newer features, which is exciting.
- Social gatherings with my parents and in-laws around Mother's day.
April 2024
- I continued work on the modernization of a student loan application for a Canadian provincial government. The project is a .NET Blazor server application, so I've been continuing my journey in building UI in C#. I'm feeling a lot more productive in this tech stack this month.
- For some technical reasons I had to buy a Windows laptop for my contract this month. I purchased a Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen 11. I have feelings about it. I prefer linux / unix environments. And I have loved my 2021 M1 Macbook Air, as it's lightweight, performant, and I can code on battery for ~15 hours. On this Intel Windows machine, I am finding
4-62-4 hours is about what it can handle. Which is awful. Overall I'm happy with the development experience in Visual Studio for .NET, which I can only get on Windows, so that's been one benefit. But I can't believe how behind Intel is compared to Apple on processors. And what I really wanted was a linux-based System76 Lemur Pro . So, yeah, feelings of disappointment all round on this one I guess. - I turned 40. That fact plus my new Windows laptop has me feeling a bit like Richie from The Bear post-forks episode.
March 2024
- March was a very busy month at work. A couple of my colleagues were away for March break and so it was just me and another teammate holding down the fort a bit, so to speak. We had a lot of fun and still a great sprint demo.
- I learned this month that my current contract will be extended for another year. The project is a .NET Blazor server application, which has me building UI in C#. It's been a great learning experience for me, and is contributing to my growth as a developer. I'm feeling very grateful for the opportunity to continue working with this team.
- This month marked my partner's 40th birthday. I and a couple of close friends planned a big surprise bash for her, with 65 of her closest friends and a bit of family gathered at Boxcar Social Riverside for a night of drinks, laughs and a bit of dancing.
- These are the songs that we partied to, and that I listened to most in March.
- Those were the highlights, see you next month ✌️
February 2024
- It was a busy month of work. I continue work on the modernization of a student loan application system for a Canadian provincial government. The project is a .NET Blazor server application, so I've been continuing my journey in building UI in C#.
- I wrote a blog post about my experience with Blazor so far. TLDR: it's pretty good, also I still miss JS 😄.
- I migrated my website to Astro, and wrote another blog post about my experience with Astro + Markdoc + Keystatic
- I got to see Brittany Howard at the Danforth Music Hall thanks to our amazing friend Cody.
- Finished final scheming on birthday plans for my partner next month 🤫
- These were the songs in my rotation in February.
January 2024
- Continued work on the modernization of a student loan application for a Canadian provincial government. The project is a .NET Blazor server application, so I've been continuing my journey in building UI in C#.
- A very busy month socially. Visits with my parents, my partner's parents, my sister's family and a bunch of close friends.
- Attended a couple of my nephew's soccer games. Amazing to see the progression.
- Went to the Art Gallery of Ontario to check out the KAWS:Family and Keith Haring exhibits. Delicious, both of them.
- Started physio for my subluxated shoulder. Not an injury I'd recommend getting.
- These were the songs in my rotation in January. A Way Forward by Nation of Language is an eminently listenable album.
December 2023
- Continued work on the modernization of a student loan application for a Canadian provincial government. The project is a .NET Blazor server application, so I've been continuing my journey in building UI in C#.
- Finally watched The Bear. It's amazing. And so much more than I thought it would be. Ostensibly a kitchen drama. Actually a show about trauma and adult children of addicts / parents with mental health issues.
- Subluxated my shoulder in a cycling accident, attempting to avoid a car parked in the middle of the road.
- These are the songs in my rotation in December.
November 2023
- Continued work on the modernization of a student loan application for a Canadian provincial government. The project is a .NET Blazor server application, so I've been continuing my journey in building UI in C#.
- Travelled to Chile for 10 days with my partner. We travelled to Punta Arenas and saw penguins on Magdalena Island; to Puerto Natales and day-hiked in Torres del Paine park (incl. the Mirador Las Torres hike); to San Pedro de Atacama and saw the Valle de la Luna, the El Tatio Geysers and Laguna Cejar; and to Santiago where we enjoyed the city and nearby Valparaíso. I'm hoping over the holidays to write a few longer-form posts about our experience.
- These were the songs that carried me through November.
October 2023
- Started work on a new contract for a Canadian provincial government to modernize their student loan application process. This is a .NET project, which takes me out of my usual React work and has me coding almost exclusively in C# to build a Blazor server application. I am accumulating a lot of knowledge of this relatively immature ecosystem, which I hope to share in a longer-form blog post one day.
- For the first time since the Covid pandemic started, I hopped on my bike and attended a tech meetup downtown. I went to the StorybookTO meetup in Toronto. A great event with great presentations on the ways organizations like Rangle.io and Wealthsimple are leveraging Storybook in their workflows. I learned a lot and met some great people and overall hope to do more meetups in the coming year.
- Stephanie Zeng from Rangle.io presented on "story-driven" development, which is an interesting variation on TDD for modern UI development.
- Seth Davenport talked about UI testing at Wealthsimple. He gave a great talk on how his teams are using Chromatic and Storybook to drive snapshot tests, a11y tests, documentation generation and test coverage, all while conceding that innovation in the tool chain matter less than innovation in the product (i.e. should be in service of the product).
- Finally, Varun Vachhar talked about using Chromatic's new Modes feature for testing. Modes sit above globals and can be used to test components in a number of different "mode" scenarios (localization, dark mode, etc.).
- I went to the premiere of The Great Canadian Baking Show new season at HotDocs. My partner, Carmen, is a photographer and she shot the cast and bakers for their various media. It was a very fun and sweet and wholesome evening.
- These were the songs that carried me through October.
September 2023
- My dad suffered a detached retina at the beginning of the month, so I spent the first half of the month up north doing some care-giving.
- Deep diving into Blazor for UI development for a new project.
- These were the songs that carried me through September.