Guess what, I got re-excited about coding, and I’m not even a developer
Okay, storytime. In the second half of 2018, I joined a fast-paced project, overtook heavy load, and got it going sprinting for a good two years before the engine broke down. Before I broke down. Seriously ill from the project and life, both physically and mentally, I stayed long enough for a correct duty handover and then moved on as the signs of tear and wear on my body were just starting to appear.
The grand plan was that, within the next few months, I rest my body and soul, only to return stronger, conquering yet another peak after reaching my utmost low I’ve ever experienced. And then, a good month in, the Corona hit. I wasn’t infected, but Europe practically shut itself down and we were only humble quarantined observers looking out, bracing ourselves from the worst.
Amidst the darkness, new light arises and somehow I joined the Sledilnik community that started to specialize in tracking the spread of COVID-19 in Slovenia as a project/product manager with a specialization in spreadsheet-like tools data manipulation. Progress was lighting fast, the fastest team I’ve ever worked with, the page was in production in just two days and different data visualizations started to appear at Sledilnik. As I was writing tickets for a future development to-do, I noticed that the color scheme for regions in Slovenia was, let say, non-optimal. Namely, the first three regions (where the spread was the biggest) had distinctive colors while other regions (with less COVID cases) were all in the same blue-ish color palette.
Boy did I hate those Shades of Blue because the region I was born in shared the same color tone as the other regions. I guess one gotta stand for something and I may be a bit over patriotic when it comes to the homeland. I just couldn’t stand it and as I was repeatedly asking developers to change the color scheme, Luka Renko, the man with the idea that ramped-up Sledilnik, calmly commented my frustration over a private message:
“If you feel that this feature is so important, and no-one else feels that way, why don’t you just code that yourself?”
The idea of meritocracy was never more alive with me as that moment, as I remembered Valve the game development company’s case study where there is no roadmap or features. If you have an idea and if you can excite your teammates about that particular idea, you might gather the momentum and bring the idea into reality. It was that little nudge that pushed me into a new direction, the one I was trying to steer myself in but didn’t find the right cause.
I downloaded VS Code the same night, cloned the Github’s repo, and started evaluating the code. I got the solution of applying 12 HEX color codes the next day (with a little help of another community member) and submitted my first PR.
Please be aware that this isn’t my first rodeo when it comes to web development. While I was in high school, I was usually responsible for basic info pages for music bands I played in, later I did a fair share of WordPress projects, but never ventured too far outside of theme customization. In November 2019, I joined an introductory JavaScript course, got very excited about repeating some stuff I knew and seeing how much the internet technologies had advanced, but failed to pick it up after the course was completed.
A transformation
Now, with this new drive (and no project to manage), I became more active and submitted a couple of small PR requests for Sledilnik. I decided that it will be beneficial for my product management skills if I will understand the code and the development process better, it will likely help me untwist some mysteries that I thought I understood (hypothesis of realizing of how little you know while you learn something new) when in reality, I merely grasped the concepts of.
In the past couple of months (well, 5 months) I worked on:
1. anomalo.si — a two language creativity blog, where I just pushed the second full app rewrite today (proud) using React.
2. gremovmongolijo.com — a two-language personal blog of a 43-day Mongolia charity rally adventure that carried me and my girlfriend Katja over 14.000 km from Slovenia to Mongolia way back in 2014. I used Gatsby and finally shut down that old WordPress site and an obsolete FTP server.
3. While we were on a short break on island Hvar in Croatia, we hiked a bit and as a result, sveti-nikola-hvar.com, a fully-fledged GPS supported travel guide with detailed descriptions and route photos of the island’s highest peak in three languages appeared from Gatsby/React/Mapbox implementation, available as PWA/offline app as well.
4. I had developed a python script for an autonomous time-lapse camera based on Raspberry Pi, that just got into MVP v.03 with 2-months of rigorous testing and functionality such as automatic calculation of sunrise/sunset, overnight shooting, different capture options for photos, automatic Youtube upload, photo compression, storage to an external HDD and uploads a photo to the interweb every 5 minutes. The package itself will be offered shortly, after a proper landing page will be created.
5. I am still somewhat active in the Sledilnik community and as we [luckily] phased out of pandemic in Slovenia, I figured out there are still potential improvements in data-gathering where a lot of data is still gathered manually and by that, I mean copy/pasting data from one Excel spreadsheet to another, therefore I deep-dived first into Google Forms and later, as obvious problems (such as authentication, permissions, etc.) arose, switched to Django and deployed a rudimentary MVP for reporting cases, that will hopefully be presented to Ministry of Health as an alternative to current spreadsheet-based data collection that would allow for faster integration with feeding prediction models resulting in faster result generation as well as automating email reporting and more.
My list of next projects and technologies I would like to tackle is getting bigger and bigger, and so is my enthusiasm for understanding the more technical part of the domain as I roll into my eleventh consecutive year as PM. At this moment, a sincere thank-you to all my mentors and Sledilnik and Slovenian Python communities are in order as the field had evolved too much and my progress would be slower by orders of magnitude without you guys. Your selfless advice was and will continue to be invaluable and I am forever indebted, especially to Jure, Joh, and Marko (in no particular order).
Please note I am aware that my code is far from perfect in any way and that most of my solutions are hackish and dirty, but my projects are well-meant, usually for the benefit of a community or someone dear. My takeaway is an ability to grasp knowledge and setting myself up with a bulletproof system that will allow me fast prototyping funnel for my ideas. All that while I will continue to pick my head with math and logical problems of which I’ve forgotten how much they excited me. Long hours in college, trying to figure out how to make a new line in a text in Visual Basic, I’m waving at you. The takeaway from this year is that it didn’t start on the high note, but it keeps getting better and I like the progress so far however, don’t start to call me a developer just yet.
What are some of the things you got out of Corona lockdown?
Did you pick any new skills, got excited about new/old passions?