Happy March!

My blog has been a little quiet in the new year, and I just wanted to make a quick post today explaining where I’ve been, what I’ve been doing, and where I’m going.

My 2024 So Far

Moving

First and foremost, I’ve been moving, which makes it hard to dedicate hours to blogging and exploring code. I’m in my current place until the end of April, and after that I’ll be moving again. Where to is not yet decided.

A New Development Environment

After using VSCode with the Vim Plugin for over a year at work, and JetBrains IDEs with the Vim plugin for years at home, I’ve decided that it’s time for me to try to set up a full Neovim/TMUX based development environment. My reasons for this are twofold:

1. I want a dev environment that is totally cross-platform. I want it to work the same on Mac and Linux, my 2 biggest development OS’s. I want to be able to wipe any of my machines and have my dev environment reinstalled and reconfigured EXACTLY how I want it within minutes.
2. I want a dev environment that is keyboard focused and configured exactly to my own taste.

So far, it’s going well. My strategy for this has been to use VSCode at work and do my configuration at home. I’ve been doing all my development at home in Neovim, and every time I want to open a full IDE for some feature, I take a few minutes and figure out how to add that feature to Neovim. It’s almost at the point where I could consider using this environment full-time. I have:

• my key bindings set up
• my base configuration done
• my LSP set up
• colour schemes, syntax highlighting, and general UI looking good
• fuzzy finding
• file management
• a few other quality of life things

It’s a pretty good setup, and I’ve found it both very rewarding to know everything about my dev environment, and very productive to have everything configured to be so efficient.

Upskilling for Work

I can’t talk too much about this here for NDA reasons, but I’m getting put on a new project next week that has required me to learn a lot of new skills in frontend technologies. It’s been a lot of fun and very rewarding to learn all of this.

I’ve been a backend engineer and I’ve been a mobile engineer and I’ve done enough devops work to be called a devops engineer, and these last 2 months going deep into learning about frontend has really made me a very well-rounded full-stack engineer. It’s been a lot of fun learning Remix and GraphQL and getting more familiar with React. A lot of holes in my knowledge have been filled, which is always a great feeling.

My Plans for the rest of Q1 2024

The rest of Q1 2024 is pretty much eaten up by finishing what’s above.

With upskilling, there is still a lot to learn.

With my dev environment, I need to set up some more fit and finish in Neovim. All the big chunks are in place, and it’s just a matter of making things work a little more smoothly. Things like:

• reconfiguring my file manager
• adding some more remaps for things I do often
• improving repo-wide search
• adding a markdown previewer
• maybe choosing a new colour scheme
  • I technically have a monokai colour scheme everywhere but my status bar, where I have molokai, and that’s starting to bother me.

After that, I’m going to start configuring TMUX. Right now, I use Warp terminal at work, and alacritty and a lot of terminal key bindings at home. It’s not consistent and it throws me off when I switch from one to the other. TMUX is available everywhere that I write code, and I’ll have it configured after I’ve finished the bulk of the work with Neovim.

With moving, there is still some final setup to do in my new place, and I need to start selling things to prepare for my move in May.

All in all, I have about a month to do about a month of work. Convenient!

My Big Plans for Q2-Q4 2024.

First up will be my second move of the year. It do be like that sometimes.

Second, I plan to overhaul this blog. I’ve known for a while that the mobile experience sucks, and I need to fix that.

After that, I’m going to dedicate more time to networking. With all the skills and wisdom that I’ve been growing in the last year since I graduated, I feel like I’m approaching the goal that I had in 2023, which was to set up a solid base of skills for myself. That means that 2024 is the time to start specializing. It’s time to start becoming a subject matter expert, and the first step in that process is to decide what to specialize in.

To do that, I need to know what companies and customers need more than anything. I don’t want to specialize in whatever the latest trend is, I want to specialize in something that has been a massive problem for companies and customers for years that takes a ton of skill to solve correctly, because at the end of the day, that’s what’s valuable.

To know what people need, I need to go out and talk to them. So, that’s my big priority in the second half of 2024.

Now that things are slowing down with moving, you’ll see a lot more activity from me.

I can’t wait to make a post at the end of the year to see how all of this went. See you all in 2025!