WHAT I AM DOING NOW

This is a very brief list of what I have been up to lately.

Our baby is one year old!

Our little baby girl has just gone past one year! The year has flown by in a whirlwind of sleep deprevation but it has been amazing 😀.

Married 2023

In 2023 we were married in the beautiful Bay of Islands in Northland, New Zealand. It was a very special day!

Working My First Software Development Job

I have recently made a huge career change. I have decided to hang the construction boots up and taken on the slightly daughnting challange of learning to code.

I spent a year or so learning from home using various online web development courses and have now been working in my first job for two years now! I am currently learning as much as can I at work in a huge amount of areas while continuing to learn through my personal projects on the side.

Started the Wellington Junior Devs Meetup Group

For the last 18 months I have been running a meetup group for junior developers in Wellington. It has been great so far and we have run successful pub meetups and speakers events at the Xero offices.

As I have taught myself to code from home I do not have any classmates or many friends in the industry. I was looking for a meetup group like this to make some friends and meet some people and when I saw that there wasn't anything around locally I decided to make my own. I am very happy with how it has gone so far!

Our first little project will be working through the 'Nand to Tetris' course (also known as the 'Elements of Computing Systems' book) as a group to improve our low level understanding of how a computer works (and of course to make friends).

Current Projects

I am currently working on a couple of projects to help me practise what I have learnt so far in my web development studies. And also to help keep learning outside of my first job.

• I am heavily focused on learning C# / .NET as a second programming language to broaden my skills. Up until this year I had mostly been working in Javascript/Typescript and so learning a completely new language and ecosystem has been a great challange.
• I have turned an old laptop into a home server and have been teaching myself more about the DevOps and Linux world. I have learned Docker and have started to deploy docker containers from my home server.
• My weather notification app has been deployed to www.adventurealarm.com - check it out! It is very simple but was a great little project to practice some skills and has enough moving parts to make it interesting. It currently sends an email notification when the current weather matches the users constraints. To make it more useful the next step will be to add in notifications based on a forecast. You can read more on github here.

Golf

For better or for worse I have taken up golf lately. After many years of not seeing what anyone could possible see in it I now have a practise net up in my backyard. I don't understand either...

Although unfortunately with a new baby my golf time is at an all time low.