Well, other than the other stuff happening (pandemic, politics, puerile president), I've had a hell of a summer really, and I'm feeling better now so I'll share a bit. I've also been trying to get back into the habit of writing and what better way than to write about myself? Here I am again, in case you forgot.
(n.b. really weird using peakd's editor [or any really] since I keep hitting vim keys to jump around in the editor: any out of place hjkl are from that)
Personal Life
Had a bit of a breakdown near the end of June (thanks pandemic stress), broke up with my girlfriend of two years, and found out ~5 days before I had to move out (I apparently signed a 9 month lease, which I now remember negotiating [no clue why], but I had forgotten), so I scrambled to move out as quickly as possible with little thought of where I would go other than heading home for a bit to recover. Luckily, I did not end up throwing out most of my shit this time (most importantly: my desk), since I had some fraternity brothers still in Denver who were able to help me out (and had cars bigger than my Mini).
I've spent about a month at home (KCMO) and am in the process of getting a new apartment back in Denver now, a fair bit nicer than the last one for not that much of an increase in price because the last one was run by a shit company (still have to pay them for 'cleaning' and 'repainting' which I'm sure they won't ever send me the invoices for). Hung out with my best friend here a bit, met some of his new friends (all great of course), and just been working a ton trying not to worry about shit too much. I've also been meditating/being more mindful, been trying to work out more, and making sure to eat breakfast since I think I get pissy on low blood sugar. Luckily work basically pays based on my output (woo coding) so I've been making some money while I'm here still.
Work
I still work at ManyBuild, a while ago I left my position at Lumiate due to stress & losing my confidence in the company a bit. Still connected with them and I've done a bit of consulting work for them, but at the time I wasn't at all confident in their direction and decided to leave since I wasn't getting paid. ManyBuild has been going great, we didn't really get hit too hard by the pandemic, because construction didn't really & devs can (and were already) mostly working from home. I've learned React-Native and have been working on the mobile app solo for a while, although we may have finally landed another dev who knows it, and we're gonna be launching pretty soon!
Other than that, we're planning on moving to Mongo from Firestore, because the limitations on Firestore kinda suck, no shade at google it's a great offering but (at least firestore itself) seems more prototype focused before you start dealing with complex data in larger amounts. Working on a backend for that in NodeJS/TS of course, continuing my attempts to get everyone to learn Typescript because it's not even hard if you already know JS.
Also hired on a fraternity brother of mine as a paid intern since he was having issues getting a job, figured we could both pay him for work done & he'd get to put something on his resume. Unluckily it seems like a lot of companies aren't hiring new grads, or want new grads with more experience (lol), or are using headhunter agencies right now which afaict absolutely suck to work with as the hunted head. He's been doing great, building simple webpages while I push him to learn React so he can help update & work on our web assets while I work on the mobile app, hard to do though (manage, that is), both since I haven't done it before & I know (or presume) from personal experience that telling people things doesn't work out sometimes, there are things you have to learn for yourself. That includes work ethic & personal learning, since you can't just stop learning after you graduate but you won't have classes in the same way, and it's hard to get used to working from home. So I'm working on my management skills, which according to our COO are good intuition wise (e.g. not being pushy, helping them learn, idk), and he's working on his coding skills.
Random Shit
I learned Rust, I guess as much as you can learn a language (I did the first book), earlier this year, and have used it a couple of times for random things at work or at home, like a price scraper for work, a cli utility for myself to handle large repos. Definitely like it, very powerful, love getting random compilation errors about ownership because it reminds me of getting random compilation errors from C but I can actually figure out the issue from the error.
Been trying to get back into philosophy a bit, a friend recommended a small list of books to get into Žižek and I'm stuck on 'A Course in Linguistics' - Ferdinand de Saussure, mostly because I bought a copy after realizing I hated reading it on my computer, but it got mailed to my old apartment and 'disappeared' (read: they threw it in the trash).
Been trying to learn spanish, and brushing up on my french and german, using Anki decks and Duolingo, seems to be going pretty well but I'm not gauging progress really, just keeping the habit up. Helps keep my mind sharp too, and I have another Anki deck for random things that I want to remember (better?).
I guess I'm still kind of silver/blonde, like half, and extremely wild looking with the beard, see pic. Planning on getting it bleached & dyed again but it's apparently very expensive when you don't have a gf who does their hair all the time and has 90% of the stuff on hand, and obviously doesn't charge you to do it. Last time I was actually playing WoW while she bleached it, guessing hairdressers wouldn't be ok with me bringing my rig to the shop though lmao.
I think that's about it, looking forward to moving back to Denver, although I'm gonna miss my best friend here terribly, and hoping I don't end up shut-in again while I'm there. Gonna setup hangouts with my buddies in Denver weekly or something though, I'll have 'em drag me out of my apartment just to get some social time. I definitely need it, but anxiety fucks me up sometimes and I don't want it.
Oh I just finished StarDust Crusaders in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure last night, started watching JoJo around beginning of July, absolutely love it amazing show.
Gonna try out exode and see how it is this week unless I get too busy with work and moving.
Want to commiserate or share your summer stories?
I don't want to hear about politics because I've heard enough while staying with my parents, and if you don't wear a mask I don't really care for your opinion.
My dad surprised me with, "If it makes other people more comfortable I'm willing to wear a mask", regarding people who think covid's a hoax (he doesn't think it's a hoax, but if he did he still would, because he's at least consistent).
n.b. If you've seen my website, and used any of the steem functionality on it, I'm working on setting up Hive for it instead of steem, but I'm busy with work and it doesn't really matter too much to the purpose of my website anyways so it could take a bit if no one messages me to ask