Another year has gone by, so it’s time to reflect!

Professional

Job/Company Change

In August of 2017, I left uShip. I was a developer there for nearly 2 years, the longest I’ve been at any company thus far. I still regularly get coffee with many of my ex-coworkers and wish them luck! They’ve gone through quite a bit of change recently.

I pursued a new opportunity at Zerocater, whose headquarters is in San Franscisco. Rest assured, I’m still in Austin though, and the only remote engineer for the company in Texas! For my next position, I wanted a results oriented environment, and to really push myself. I work in Python/Django now, in addition to some VueJS here and there.

Having work remote before, it wasn’t an entirely new experience, but it did take some time to switch gears.

Here’s some quick tips I found helpful.

• Improve your ability to focus as much as you can. I read Deep Work recently, and highly recommend it for improving your focus.
• If you work from your home mainly, make sure to keep your office tidy, and preferably separate from your relax/living areas. Having an extra room was great for this, but I’m not 100% there as I still play guitar/video games in my “work environment”.
• Communicate ALL the time. State what you’re doing in Slack if you don’t have a daily standup. Especially when you’re starting out, someone might have a tip or two to help you out on your current effort.

Yogenda

Shortly before I left uShip, they hosted a hackathon (one of my favorite aspects of uShip’s culture.) I wanted to really knock something out of the park, because my previous endeavors were too ambitious and never got off the launchpad. I was doing yoga weekly (another uShip perk) and my coworker/instructor was handling signups every week through a Slack channel.

It’s a pretty simple “sign-up” application, but it’s one of my most well put together apps! I gathered two coworkers, Kyle and Lyla to help me out! We needed to produce this app pretty fast with the time we were alloted (and definitely spent some hours outside of the hackathon), so I decided upon Meteor. The convienence of Meteor combined with libraries like Autoform produce features fast.

It worked out extremely well! Yogenda is running, connected to a federated Azure Active Directory system used by uShip, which allows them to easily login with their uShip accounts via OAuth, no registeration required! And it’s running on a AWS micro instance!

HOTSBA

HOTSBA took a backseat this year, besides some bug fixes. I still recieve inquiries and interest, which I’m really happy about. I did start a preliminary VueJS rebuild, since the frontend is pretty convoluted, but time will tell if I will have the time/motivation.

Personal

Most of the development in this past year was within myself. I switched up my hobbies quite a bit. I’ve been lifting weights steadily 3 days a week in the morning, and now go bouldering weekly. It’s a great activity, a mix of physical, mental willpower, and finesse. Another rite of passage was getting over my fear of heights at Enchanted Rock.

I also traveled to new places often in 2017. Here’s a quick list of places I went to:

• Europe
  • Netherlands
    • Eindhoven
    • Tilburg
    • Amsterdam
  • Belgium
    • Tongeren
  • Germany
    • Sand
    • Black Forest
    • Koln
    • Freiburg
  • France
• Iceland
• Haiti
• Grand Lake, Colorado

One of my favorite places was Iceland. Here’s a travel map of one day!

Iceland was my favorite out of everything, and I hope to visit again sometime. Unfortunately, it’s become a bit overrun with tourism, so it can be rough.

I’m excited to see what 2018 brings!