Weeknotes 25:16

Posted 14 hours ago

Week of April 13–19

First week

This was my first full week of working remotely for my new job. As I mentioned, I had traveled up to Michigan to onboard at Revive Our Hearts office the week before. That time was filled with meetings, setup, and getting familiar with things. This past week, I jumped into some actual tasks. They were all relatively easy tasks that helped me to get more familiar with how to update content on the main website and get familiar with the team processes.

The first couple of days were rough and tiring just because of the amount of information to absorb and having to learn a CMS I was not familiar with. I am also trying out some different tools and getting use to a new computer.

There were a lot more meetings than usual as I jumped on several Slack huddles to watch someone else go through a task and learn from that experience. There were also several meet and greets with different members of the digital team. All those meetings left this introvert worn out at the end of the day.

The latter part of the week got better as I got more familiar with processes and the Django CMS. As things got more familiar, I also had more confidence to poke around and try to figure things out on my own. It was nice to get some tasks under my belt and start feeling productive. I was also glad that it was a shorter week as we got off on Friday to celebrate Good Friday.

Helping my son

My son’s first website. It has a late 90s or early 00s vibe to it, which is when I started building websites. The site is only desktop friendly as this point as they were getting into responsive design the last few weeks of the class.

On Sunday, I got to help out my son as he built out his first web project for his web design class. He built a site for the Tate Museum, which has several different locations. He wanted to display different exhibitions and then be able to filter those by venue and by art type (drawing, painting, photography, etc.). They did not spend much time looking at Javascript in his class so he wanted my help.

I am a bit rusty after not spending as much time coding over the past year as I looked for a new job. I decided to get some assistance from ChatGPT. I have been interested in exploring the use of LLM to help me in my work despite my hesitancy to use LLMs. I have read others share their experience and had been encouraged to check out Cursor but someone I met recently through the job search.

I had some practice using ChatGPT to help me to rework my resume for specific job openings this past year and to help write cover letters based on job descriptions and my updated resume. So I had experience prompting the tool and knowing how to ask it to refine the solution.

I had a pretty positive experience getting the tool to help me write a script for my son. I knew what I wanted and was able to prompt the tool. The script continued to evolve as I thought of new conditions and how I wanted to modify the script. We started with a basic script that would filter based on the venue or the art type. I was then able to combine the filtering so that the user could choose a venue and an art type. My son had already incorporated an “all venues” and “all art types” button so I used those to reset the filters. I went back the next day and added one more modification. I wanted to display a message if no results were returned with the filtering.

I enjoyed working with my son though I felt like it was mostly him watching me interact with ChatGPT. He said he learned a lot and saw that you had to know what you were doing in order to prompt ChatGPT and then be able to evaluate the output that the tool gave you.

I am looking forward to collaborating with him this summer while he is home. He would like to learn more about WordPress and redesign the site I built for him a couple of years ago to display his work. It is nice to have a shared interest and been able to interact with him over that interest which is also how I have built a career.

Articles I read

What I watched

Are we Entering the Post-Developer Era? (Kevin Powell) – Kevin reads through Josh Comeau’s article, The Post-Developer Era and shares his own thoughts.

Books I am reading

Walking

  • Monday – 4.01 miles in 1 hour 15 minutes
  • Tuesday – 1.53 miles in 28 minutes

What I listened to

I usually think of this album around Easter time and it usually is the only time I listen to it. It walks through Christ’s life. It has a powerful narrative of Christ’s death and a triumphant athem to celebrate the resurrection. I listened to it on Friday while waiting for my daughter when I picked her up from school.

What I played this week

MLB The Show 20 (Twins) – I went 4-1 this week. I won three games in a row coming back late in the game to win or take the lead.

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