2023, A Year of Optimism and Improvement

Hello! It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, but since school has started back up it’s time to start these back up again. First and foremost, the break was amazing. At the end of the year I had over two weeks with no school or work and it was the most relaxing thing. I worked on thinking about what I want to see from myself this year and what kind of goals I’m looking to set. Then, on top of that, when I got back to work I was actually making a ton of progress on projects that I was previously stuck on. My burnout is gone and I am so excited about it.

Acxiom

This past month at work I’ve been working on an internal website for my team at Acxiom. To do this I have been learning nodejs, express, jade/pug, JSON, and a lot of things surrounding those topics. The amount of learning I have done this past month while directly working on this has been insane. Yesterday, I went to talk to one of my coworkers that is about to leave the company about this, and he informed me that he was making an internal site as well and that it would do well if I ported my stuff onto there. He was very surprised to know that I knew so much about websites and kinda excited as well, because no one else on the team knows how to make websites. So, he is going to invite me to the call that he is going to have with two others this week to brief us on this website, and then I might end up being the main person that maintains and improves it, at least until the other two people get trained up. There is one caveat though, his website is written in React. I don’t know React. So, for the rest of the week I am going to be going into React sandboxes, watching videos, and reading material to become familiar with the language. Again, I am excited about this opportunity and hope that everything goes smoothly under me.

Cultivating Competencies

Quite a bit to talk about here since the last post! We have worked a lot on polishing up this game, such as trying to make sure that certain values are tweaked, but the main thing of note is how much time we have put into trying to get analytics to work and to make downloading easier. Some things I did are make the logo of the game the Hendrix logo, make much more detailed instructions on the itch page, and do a lot of experimentation/research into the publishing of apps or putting the app on the webpage. Analytics feels impossible but we might have a way, or a couple ways, to do it now. We are going to continue trying to see what is possible. For one thing, we got the game to run on itch again! It no longer crashes every time you try to run it on a chromium browser. Also, while I still want to go through the notarization to see what that includes, it is possibly no longer necessary.

We are making progress and I hope that we reach our goals of having the game polished up by the end of the month. Here’s to a good week!

What’s Coming Up?

• Learn React
• Continue working on a better landing page for this blog.
• Change “Projects” page to be a portfolio.
• Edit all the pages connected to the WIP landing page.

TL;DR

• Had a great winter break
• No longer burnt out
• Made a lot of progress at work
• Gonna have to learn React now
• Made the app logo the Hendrix logo
• Put up detailed instructions for Cultivating Competencies
• Found a few more avenues to try for Analytics
• Got Cultivating Competencies working on the web again!