Most of my drawings I’ve published recently, I was doing on paper bought at Daiso in the CBD, but of course I’ve not been in the CBD since early March, so I ended up ordering some from an art place. Its way better paper. Thick and nicer to use. Also about 3 times the price : so really I am glad it’s better paper!
The surface is rougher than the smooth, cheaper paper, and I like the way it gives me a little texture that is not just about the strokes of the pencil. Laying a pencil on it’s side and rubbing softly will give fill without obvious strokes for softer pencils, which is nice.
So there will be more of these pictures coming along.
Yesterday was my first year anniversary at work, which is an interesting time to kind of take stock of where I am currently at. I did the internship for 6 months and then took a role as an Associate Software Engineer.
It’s been a never ending learning experience that often leaves me very tired but sometimes is really stimulating.
I was sitting on a zoom call with my tech lead yesterday and we were going through a yaml file and talking about what was needed for this thing we were working on; I was getting an intensive coaching session, and initially thinking “I HAVE BEEN HERE FOR A YEAR AND I KNOW NOTHING!!!!”.
But it was not true. I know enough about what I do to be able to understand what was going on and why, even if I can’t write things from scratch yet.
I started my internship with the capacity to write basic things in ruby, a beginners knowledge of how to push things into my own github repository, how to do a bit of maintenance work on linux, and some nebulous concepts about rest apis.
In my first day at work they gave me a mac book and I immediately fucked up logging in because THE KEYS WERE FREAKING ME OUT. One of the other interns told me: “The first words I heard from you were “FOR FUCKS’ SAKE!”!”
Start as you mean to go on, I say.
Since day 1 I have learned much about AWS non relational data stores, clusters, shards, pods, kubernetes operators, golang, and docker; these are the meat of the development work I’ve been dealing with. I’ve learned all sorts of buzzwords that software companies like mine, which deal with massive amounts of data, must learn in the modern world – and what they actually mean. I have submitted PRs, done code reviews, deployed, looked at and added metrics to code. The sheer amount of stuff that sits around being a developer is larger than any role I’ve ever had – it’s been good. I am not bored, I am not frustrated (other than frustrations of not knowing enough/going too slowly for what I think I should/ having to rely on other people to tell me how to do things, and the good old frustration of WHY DOESN’T THIS CODE ACTUALLY WORK ARGH!).
The stuff my team works on is abstract and experimental and being able to intern and then start working in this domain and learning on the job the complexities has been frankly amazing.
So if in one year I’ve come so far – I’m actually stunned with how much I think I’ve learned and now know – I can imagine how much I will have built up by my second year Which began today!