Dwong G Doownp

14 Jun 2021

I had what felt like the first in a long time: a day full of meetings.

First, I met with Josh. I felt bad for him, because I could tell he was feeling the pressure, and I was trying to guide him along and give him resources without giving him the answer. He was making a lot of the same mistakes I’d made when I first started, so this was difficult as I really wanted to just walk him through it.

Then I met with my former company about the proposal we’d submitted back in February. This actually went really well, and I am once again hopeful. This time I met with the Tech manager and not the plant manager. He’s a little more motivated to implement a project like this, so I’m hopeful.

Then I took Tails over to our neighbors house for a doggy play date. These people are just so sweet. They are the types that when they offer you food, you accept it without any resistance, because they’d be offended if you turned it down. They did, and so I accepted the 11AM home-cooked cajun meal.

They made me a whole plate to walk home with and thanked me over and over for bringing Tails over for a playdate. They just loved on Tails the moment she got there–these are the people whose dog I caught in my yard and put in my backyard the day after we found Cheddar dead in our front yard. I’m glad I fought through my anger at all dogs and helped that dog.

Later I met with Micah about a number of things including helium hotspots, BTC being back above $40k (yay!), my web-sandbox, and some other stuff including ric-rac-ruby-o.

PS. I did have a README! I was in the lib directory when i pushed and not the main project directory, and so it didn’t push… It was incredibly embarrassing when Micah mentioned I didn’t have a readme, and I was so perplexed. I saw the problem, and fixed it, but yikes! Rookie mistake for sure–or really, just a lack of attention for details. Trust but verify as my least favorite supervisor ever used to say to me on a daily basis. In this case, while I trusted commits and pushes to make it to github, i should have verified.

After the call, I became concerned that none of my previous pushes actually made it to github…That would be very bad…

Then I met with Josh again to help him get through his minimax. Micah had already helped him through a lot, and the problem was staring me in the face, so I couldn’t resist swapping the signs around for the score. Suddenly, all was passing! He was a little dumbfounded that all it took was changing 2-3 small lines. I was surprised that I actually know that algorithm so well that I can see the problem in nothing but a quick review. Helps that I did it as a kata yesterday. Just the minimax in clojure. I haven’t done it in clojure in, well, probably 8 months. It took me a minute, but I got there, and i feel like i actually made it look pretty good. One loop and one map–and a filter. It’s about three functions with a few helpers, and the entire thing including finding the wins in the board is fewer lines than my two functions in my original ttt minimax contained put together.

Then I worked on the login for Epic. An agile planning tool. Once I had a lot commented out as well as tests passing, i thought perhaps we could use a login template, so i went forward with that. I’ll ask micah tomorrow if he thinks that would be useful as well as if there might be security risks.

Finally a meeting with my former-former company. That went so-so, although I tried to remain optimistic and most certainly tried to work with her. She was concerned that it was way over budget–oh the corporate companies pinching their pennies over things that would help them ever so much… Nonetheless, I smoothed over the proposal by removing the unnecessaries to help out. Hopefully that will be an easier dollar figure for corporate to swallow.


Rex: Rex woke me up last night at 4AM with a huge emergency–he lost his Stripes truck. It was gone. I found it under his bed, handed it to him, and said “did you really just wake me up and call me all the way over here for a truck?!” He got back into bed and went back to sleep. Then at 5, he came to my bed to get his morning snuggles in.

Leo: Leo learned about chocolate today, or should i say “dwong-g-dwoonp” “mwor! Mwor! Mwor dwong-g-dwoonp!” I gave him more just to hear him say it again.