Month: May 2022

Hello everyone welcome back to my continuing escapades of my last quarter at OSU and first few month as a software engineer!

RailsConf is next week and while I am excited to spend time with my new teammates and stay in a nice hotel room and dine out for a week on the company tab, I have a feeling it’s going to be incredibly overwhelming. Many of the events at the conference will be hands-on workshops and I have a feeling I will being a little out of my element. I’m crossing my fingers for some beginner friendly events and a welcoming community (which may be a tall order in this, in my opinion, heavily over-gate-kept industry. But I am optimistic!) I will definitely report back. If anyone is reading this and has been to the conference in the past I would be curious about your experience.

In capstone project news, I’ve been diving a lot deeper into Firebase lately for some project features. NoSQL originally seemed a little weird and sloppy to me but now that I’ve used it a bit more, I cant imagine using anything else for a personal and small projects. It’s just so easy, especially with flutter/dart. Nested arbitrary JSON objects really are a great way to store data. I wish that I would have looked into a bit more before starting the capstone project and then we wouldn’t have needed our PostgreSQL API backend at all. That said, it’s a bit scary. I am very curious about what is actually going on under the hood. The amount of work that went into making it a usable as it is is incredible. SQL is still king in the industry and I wouldn’t be surprised if there ultimately was a traditional database somewhere in the many layers of abstraction that support Firebase. Everyday that I learn something new in this field/industry I am blown away by the complexity and with what experience devs are able to abstract away and still keep performant. It is exciting and hopefully I can someday contribute to some similar cutting edge project.

Anyway, my next post will be live and direct from RailsConf so stay cool until then.

Well, it’s May 5th so you know what that means; It’s time to break out the margaritas get LOCO. But not me, alas, because I, like many of you, have a certain project that I need to be working on. But that’s fine because I can almost already smell the paper that my new diploma will be printed on. The project midpoint is here and what was originally a vague and seemingly insurmountable task has now taken its primordial form and I think we’re actually going to pull this project off. Fantastic. The app is starting to actually function and I think we might even have the main functionality completed by the end of this weekend. Funnily enough, we haven’t even named the app yet so we’ll have to get around to that. The trend these days seems to be to apply the ‘ly’ of ‘ify’ suffix to the end of some related word (see Grammarly, Shopify, etc…) I personally think the trend is a little lame but I’m sure some marketing team out there has made a killing. We’ll probably go with something like that.

In other news, I mentioned in an earlier post that I will be attending RailsConf as part of my new job but now looks like I will be attending another industry event as well. Looks like I’ll be going to DEFCON this year in August in fabulous Las Vegas Nevada. What was originally planned as a one day visit to the convention with my programmer friends before I was employed is now going to be another awesome event that I can have at least a somewhat valid reason for attending! My new company is a cyber security company and it looks like they might even be paying for some of it (winning). That said, I’ll still probably be one of the dumbest people in the room and I’ll have to make sure to completely turn off all of electronics on the show floor lest I risk getting my identification info hacked and plastered on the famous DEFCON wall of shame. Super excited.