It’s hard to believe it’s only been two weeks since the last of these updates! A ton has happened in the last couple of weeks. My wife was invited to speak at a pretty prestigious conference in her field (physical therapy, strength and conditioning), so we took a trip out to Columbus, OH over the last weekend in October. I won’t lie, it was stressful managing work and schoolwork with travel in the mix, but it was a good trip. A great friend of mine also happens to live in Columbus, and I got to see him for the first time in a year – great times.
During that same weekend and the week that followed, I finished up the work project I mentioned in the last blog – the data pipeline for a big service my team at Amazon is developing. Feedback was great on that project, and while it’s only the first iteration in a long-running project, I’m definitely happy it went well. I’m about three months into this job, and I think I’m making a good impression so far.
Also on the “regular job” front, I’ve been tasked with something even bigger on that same project – essentially an expansion of the data pipeline I was already working, but with the major addition of a couple of caches. At a very high level – don’t want to get too into the weeds in this blog – I’m designing the data flow from a set of source-controlled configuration files all the way to the caches responsible for holding the data whose requirements are outlined in said configs. Those caches include 1. a smattering of static content and boilerplate that’ll need to be displayed in this service’s client app and 2. an aggregated set of employee-specific data. That employee data has to be pulled from various services for every employee at the company and aggregated into a payload digestible by the aforementioned client app.
This is the first time I’ve really architected any cloud solution, let alone one as complex and feature-rich as this one. I got some great feedback from my manager on the first iteration of the design, and now it’s a matter of working with a few colleagues to make sure we’re all on the same page as far as the schemas and data models involved in this cache management system, client app, and a couple of backend services we’ll need to develop.
Outside of work, this project plugs along! It’s been tough finding time amidst everything else, but I’m finally happy with how things are shaping up. I think there comes a point in any project when you get over the hump of researching and painstakingly “figuring things out” and really get to start picking up the pace on feature development. Better late than never, I’ve been at that point for a couple of weeks now, and I’m really enjoying getting into the flow of Flutter coding. A minimum viable product is my goal for the end of this quarter, but I’m definitely going to keep going on this project with a variety of improvements – a more fleshed-out data model, a fancier-looking UI, and some cloud-based features – maybe eventually writing all data to the cloud. I want to get some actual users on this thing, and while I personally like the idea of local data storage, I think it’s a risky proposition to expect users’ devices to maintain their own data.
Oh, and it was also our anniversary (mine and my wife’s, five years) this last weekend, just one weekend after the Columbus trip. We were frankly too beat to do much of anything, so we stayed in and made some homemade pizzas and soup – a staple dinner for us. We’ll be a little more refreshed this weekend, so we’re planning to really go out and celebrate…we’re both very low maintenance and enjoy nights in, but it’s always nice to get out, have someone else do the cooking, and just focus on conversation. It’ll also be a nice reprieve from the craziness of my current schedule, so I’m looking forward to it!
