I left my job at AlphaPoint, and have been unemployed for most of August. There are more than one or two reasons for this move, and some nuance which I won't be touching on here (ask me if you're really curious). This post is to shed some light on what I have been doing recently, and the choices I'm in the process of making.
Some things I've been doing:
- journalizing and "quantified life" stuff
- some side hustle stuff which I'm keeping hush-hush right now
- Playing a lot of guitar and taking guitar lessons in the style of Django Reinhart
- I bought an electric cello (it arrived today but I haven't picked it up yet)
- French lessons online at takelessons.com
One of my goals when I quit my job was to use it as an opportunity to do some open source work and work on side projects.
I've done a little bit of this, but mostly I've been taking a break from development. However, I feel the drive returning.
Yesterday, I started tinkering on a project that I've been thinking about for quite a while (see my blog post on it), so that's exciting.
Continuing with the git theme, I created another twitter account which I'm calling git log --oneline )(@git_log_oneline). I'll be dropping short little git tips and tricks there. It should be fun.
I also managed to sucessfully update dependencies of this site. See the relevant commit. This brought be to Gatsby 2.0, which seems like a solid evolution of a cool platform. It wasn't without some amount of difficulty. One major change they made was changing the way that Layouts were composed. It broke the whole presentation of the site, but Gatsby's upgrade guide was well put together and after some tweaks it looks as good as new. I think the code is more sensible too.
I hope to continue putting some real work into this site and my other projects in the coming days. My GitHub and open-source porfolio really doesn't contain anything I'm truely proud of or that displays my strengths. I think getting this site up to snuff would be a great base for my portfolio to grow upon.
This site still is only accessible via my github pages url (https://zachlysobey.github.io), but I'd really like use http://zach.lysobey.com instead, which currently hosts a pretty crappy WordPress site.
Also, the structure of this site needs a lot of work, and I need to put some real thought into what I want it to be.
It'd be great to have a central place -- probably the root of the site -- which is a feed of all my activities, music, programming, personal-blog, external links, and also have seperate pages broken out for each. I sort of have that structure already, but without the rolled-up feed on the homepage, and I don't think I understand the gatsby structure and patterns well enough yet to really pull it off.