It's been awhile since my last update but not because I've been lazy, moreso because I've been so busy getting shit done. As such, this update will be terse so I can go back to focusing on higher priority items. But I knew y'all were wondering what I was up to so didn't want to leave you entirely in the dark.

work

Currently my focus is on the next step in my career. For the past few months I've been asking myself:

• What do I want to accomplish?
• How will I accomplish it?
• Where will I accomplish it?

It's mid may and I'm still not totally sure on the last two but I think I've come up with a pretty solid answer for the first so I thought I'd share. In my next career sprint, I want to:

• Understand how platforms scale. And by scale I mean really scale. Like how are they dealing with thousands/millions of concurrent users kind of scale.
• Lead bigger / harder projects. I've mostly decided I want to stay in the product development side of things for the foreseeable future but that doesn't mean I only want to code what's handed to me! There are other skills involved in bringing a software project from genesis to maturity and I feel like the best way to highlight these skills and subsequently improve on them is to get experience doing it.

Aside from those, my tenants from my first job search generally hold:

• great (smart, good, awesome, etc.) people
• real && challenging problems
• a focus on self-improvement / learning

I've thus been using a combination of the above to help direct my search. More details to come when I wrap up my search, tentatively scheduled for end of May / early June.

projects

Aside from studying up for interviews, I've allocated a little bit of effort towards my side projects. Herein lie updates. If you have feedback, hmu.

Will I get cancer?

Will I get cancer? is a small project I've been working on for the past few months as part of Tikkun Olam Tuesdays or my weekly (at least ideally) allocation towards making the world a better place. The problem this project tries to tackle is that while there's a lot of cancer research out there, people still don't have a good grasp of how likely they are to be intimately effected by it. It does this by aggregating data from respected cancer research organizations in a way that's human-centric.

But enough talk, the best way to see what's what is to see it live

writing

My writing output has been down since I started prioritizing interview study but I think it's still an important part of development for me and is the only way I'm going to get my presence back to anywhere near pre-sirhamy[dot]com levels. So I persist. Some pieces I think are worth highlighting:

• Imagining personal DOS attacks (or how to ransomware your friends in 17 lines of JavaScript or less)
• Zeit Now: Gitlab CI Integration
  • I cross-posted this one to dev.to and while I didn't get a huge amount of reactions, it was easy and seems like a good way to continue building presence

zima-blue

Sometime in the past few months (idk, time's been flying by), I sat down and binged Netflix's Love Death and Robots. It was v good and would highly recommend. Anywho, one of the episodes, zima blue, inspired me to make in the usual way I'm inspired to make.

them: here's my thing.

me: that looks cool. Bet I could do it better.

So I made:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by HAMY.LABS (@hamy.labs) on Apr 17, 2019 at 6:24am PDT

Right now it's pulling a random photo from the Unsplash API and generating a rectangle over it. I have plans to create a web frontend for it to display generations made daily as both a way to complete the project and learn more about cloud hosting options, particularly cdn. But my priorities lie elsewhere so that could be a minute.

I'll also make a real project page for it eventually but not pressing rn.

Yes this project is stupid but I promise you'll have more appreciation for it once you watch LDR, kthxbye.

adventures

Big adventures have mostly been put on hold and even local adventures have taken a back seat to my interviewing priorities. That being said, I did make it out to some cool places. You can check the Insta for more.

Some cooler news is that I believe I've found a good hamventures template that both displays the relevant info in an easy-to-parse and attractive way while also being relatively easy / fast for me to put together. This was always a goal of mine as looking up adventures takes so much time already, I wanted to limit the extra cost incurred by sharing them. You can see the newest theme from my last hamventure post.

self

A lot of the last few months have been focused outward rather than inward. And that's okay.

The important thing is to notice and adjust accordingly.

Some things I've been doing well

• keeping active (physically)
• meditating regularly (my hot takes here)

Some things I can improve on

• regularly creating and sticking to my goals
• eating cheap and healthy
• keeping stretchy (via yoga mostly)
• regularly healing the world (mostly via Tikkun Olam Tuesdays)

fin

My hope is that a lot of the (unplanned) irregularity in my life will die down near the end of May and then I can begin focusing more on re-balancing via my habits. Only time will tell if that's true or not, but I'm confident I can handle it either way.

Live long and prosper.

-HAMY.OUT