2024 01 first month as developer

Why am I saying "first month as developer". It is official. Fort the last 2 or even 3 years I myself was trying to become a developer. Wordpress sites, Django sites here and there - all my own initiatives and most of them had impact only to me. Like those projects are not large scale, I could stop working on them at any time without any consequences.

At my first tech workplace - I have created a few solutions/apps, but they were not my primarily focus, I did them mostly in my free time.

At me second tech workplace(current one, just previous department) - again, the programming was mostly my initiative and was not viewed as my primary task. Again, if I did any kind of programming - it was mostly because I had some free time or did it after work hours.

But now it is different. In the previous status update I have mentioned about the change in teams. It has finally happened. I am in the new team and I am programming full time!

• connect-to-a-remote-server-over-vscode
• connect-to-a-remote-server-over-emacs-and-tramp
• reach-django-project-from-anywhere
• docker-test-container
• ssh-into-gcp-server
• login-to-gcp-server-with-username-and-password
• set-the-correct-server-time
• cronjob-test-job
• never-ending-task-and-notes-capturerefilearchive-question
• nixos-commands
• django-commands
• no-username-in-commits
• convert-denote-links-to-org-links-for-html-export

My new team looks very mature, they work together very well, there is no chaos. PO is strong, Tech Lead is very strong, Manager is new, but with aaa lot of experience as well. I better try not to disappoint them all :D

Happy that we are on the same page with the Righs app as well, some time will be given to the app in this team also.

The project I am involved in now is a Django project. It is mostly(100%) configured to be used from the admin panel perspective using unfold theme. Adding information, fetching information from external services, authentication, etc.

On my personal projects I would have never tried to modify the admin. It seemed like a black box for me, complicated, unknown, seemed that if you want to make a change you need to write custom code, etc. I would have never done it myself. But this project made me to. There were already examples of it by my colleague, so it was easier to get into. What is nice is that I am learning new things daily!

• I had to fix my nixos installation to be able to connect to mssql db over pyodbc (so I could develop in my favorite environment - Emacs). The process is described in work notes.
• I had to get to know to a over a quite big django project with 5-10 apps in it
• Learned more about htmx use in django project
• Partial rendering
• ldap authentication in django
• keyclock authentication in django?
• Learned that you can store env variables in activate.bat or activate scripts of virtual env
• learned more about the principles of OOP in python and how it all connects (strange that I did not have this understanding before, but happy I do now!)
• First time worked with Faker library to generate fake data for the project
• I am now rebuilding the models of a few of the apps to meet the client needs, dealing with migrations, kind of painful and complicated stuff, but it's interesting and I am learning a lot.

I now realize that this is the moment I was waiting for 2-3 years.

• Do programming for work
• Be able to work remotely
• Use Python/Django at work
• Use Emacs at work

It might be time to think about my future goals ;)

Lifeapi project from the new year was down for a little bit because of the year/month change from 2023-12 to 2024-01. The sorting problem..

Other than that this was quite a dry month in terms of development of personal projects. More than usual time in Vilnius, evenings busy with something else.

Learning new things at work and I really want to implement them in lifeapi project. Will try to find some more time to work on it this month.

Also I have noticed that it is worthwhile to get to know to basics of programming, like "development patters", other good practices, etc. Read more of Django documentation. I think this would really benefit my coding experience.

Previously best way to learn programming for me was to actually building stuff, finding out how it works. Now when I + - know how stuff works, I think I should focus on good practices more.