Weeknote 2020-31

It is now Week 31. When I started writing weeknotes I made a promise to myself that I would write one once a week. The last was Weeknote 2020-19. So that means I've missed 12 weeks. Why? Well... Lockdown happened, and COVID-19 and I missed one week... then had so much to write, I couldn't fit it all in next week... then the week after I had even more to catch up on... and so on.

Today is my birthday! Yay! Happy Birthday me! And I'm feeling pretty happy right now. No, really, really quite happy. Although things have been a bit strange in the world, today has been a really really good day. And an old friend of mine just tweeted about me inspiring him to write weeknotes for his new job. I thought “OK, that is inspiration for me to start again!” at the same time, he said exact the same thing:

So what has happened in the past 12 weeks? Well we have been transitioning everything online as we (as much of the world) are working remotely now. In fact, I never really noticed it, but as Matthew Wilkes says in the thread above, maybe it was the lack of commute that stopped me writing? When I started this new role four months ago, I was going to be doing a weekly trip to London by train. I planned to use the train journey as time to reflect on the week and write my weeknote. No travel = no commute = no train = no weeknotes.

I have still been writing though, I've been blogging and recording videos about what I've been up to. My original plan was to try and produce one piece of content a day. That hasn't quite happened, but I've been fairly close. My idea was, say, Tuesday I'd to a live stream on Twitch, Wednesday I'd publish the video of the stream, Thursday I'd write up a blog post about it. I've not quite hit my target, but the goal is still there.

Call for Code

One of the main things that has been driving me these past 12 weeks has been a competition called Call for Code. I've written about Choirless a number of times, and been documenting how things have been going:

This project has been amazing fun. I've been working with two fantastic colleagues, Sean and Glynn and learned so much along the way.

We won the UK Labs preliminary competition, and now waiting to hear the result of the global competition. I think we hear in September.

The project seems to be capturing people's imagination both within IBM and beyond. We have launched a limited public beta, and getting multiple enquiries per day for people wanting to use it. I have recently been testing the scalability of it to see if it will scale to the level of dealing with a 120-member marching band!

Organisation / Productivity

I built a thing. It seems to be working well so far.

Hackathons

I have participate in a couple of hackathons in this time too. Mostly around one of my passions, online payments. May sound dull, but we can move information around the globe in milliseconds, but we can't do the same for payments and value.

For the DEV.to / Grant for the Web hackathon I created a tool called Joyful Tweets that analyse tweets in your timeline and just show you the “joyful” ones. This was a lot of fun, and gave me a chance to play around with various IBM services, such as Watson Tone Analyzer and Cloud Foundry.

I have also started work on another hackathon, around PayIDs. The deadline for this is in about 4 days time, so I need to get cracking on this. I'm working on this in conjunction with a colleague Si Metson. As the person responsible for me applying for a job at IBM, and being my manager for a while it is great to be working with Si again now.

I has worked well having Si on the stream, and there is a good banter between us and the people in the Twitch chat channel. It is like taking pair programming to a further level. It worked surprisingly well using Skype between us, VSCode's remote sessions, and OBS to broadcast it live.

I have also been named on a proposal submitted by Si above to Grant for the Web around a project to enable electronic music producers to more easily monetize their content. We will hopefully hear soon if the idea gets funding.

The weekly Twitch stream live coding sessions have been going really well. I am streaming every Tuesday at 2pm BST on the IBM Developer Twitch channel.

This has all been feeding in to a strategy I've been working on regarding Developer Advocacy in that I am using real events (e.g. hackathons) to draw topics and materials for the live stream Twitch sessions. Then publishing the videos in multiple places, and writing up the videos as well. I was asked recently for some stats on my Twitch streams for a managers meeting. These are two of the slides I came up with:

I was told today that the information went down very well on the meeting and was met with a round of applause!

Birthday

So as I said at the start today is my birthday. I've not done much for my birthdays the last few years. And of course this year many things are on hold. But it has been an fantastic day.

I had a really productive day working on some of the stuff for Choirless, which involved re-architecting our rendering pipeline on IBM Cloud Functions to be more parallel. Also taking advantage of some new filters in the latest ffmpeg 4.3.1. I spent quite a bit of time getting that version in a Docker image to use, but got there in the end. I also spent some time on the ffmpeg filter code. It is actually really nice code, and I can see myself writing a custom filter for ffmpeg at some point.

Then I got the news of the above Twitch stream information being very well received by the management team, which was a great feeling. Also, my colleagues on the UK & Ireland team did a birthday video for me. I was really touched. Especially by their kind words on how it's been working with me. The feeling is mutual. I've learned so much in the past four months. I can't believe it has only been four months. Feels like forever... in a good way!

I had an awesome birthday present from XRP The Standard Productions... a satire piece on myself an my trading bots!

Then I finished the day off with a cycle to the supermarket to grab some steaks and came back and had a BBQ. A few beers sat out in the evening sun with the dog, some nice Malbec with the steaks (I even made a Bearnaise sauce, first time... was delicious). And now a nice single malt.

Life is good :)

Header photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash