May 12, 2022

I’ve been busy with working on some coursework for the past few weeks.

I started a Software Engineering bootcamp with Flatiron School a few weeks ago since I decided enough is enough in terms of having to settle with technical support gigs as a career. I only ever get approached for tech support jobs nowadays, which is kind of sad comparatively since I have tried so hard over the past few years to be seen as more than just my current position.

Hoping I can convince recruiters otherwise one day soon, and finally get the ‘Junior Software Engineer’ or ‘Fullstack Engineer’ job I have been dreaming about for quite some time.

In terms of coursework, it has slowly been ramping up in difficulty, but in a good way. Honestly, its been very fun to be able to learn how to really get down to the nitty gritty and just work on projects on my own. To be fair, I am actually grateful that I’ve learned a good majority of the background of some of the material through previous jobs, but more so by dabbling in random topics for the past few years.

I am glad I decided to do a bootcamp because learning the same material yourself is doable, but without direction, deadlines, and actual 1-on-1 help, it is that much harder to do, let alone figure out since most documentation pages on any web dev topics are really only meant for seasoned professionals. Moreso, from what I’ve seen on most job listings, companies won’t even look at you without the Bachelor’s in Computer Science or a bootcamp anyway, so it’s worth a shot.

I do have some ideas on how to add more to the ‘Portfolio’ section of this site given what I have learned so far. However, I need slightly more time to refine what I’m thinking to actually present on this site. Shouldn’t be too hard to implement as the earlier basic web apps we’ve made are some basic NodeJS examples using ‘fetch()’ via ‘POST’ requests with chained ‘.then()’ blocks to send and retrieve data.

On a related note, I actually created my first pull request (PR) recently since I’ve been trying to tweak my Emacs config accordingly and remembered that the ‘Uncle Dave Emacs’ YouTube channel had a video on the ‘ihsec’ utility that allows you to change Emacs configs on the fly:

I realized after downloading the ‘ihsec’ utility and poking around on the related GitHub issues page that the ‘Makefile’ was expanding an environment variable to an incorrect directory due to the ‘SHELL’ environment variable not being used. With this in mind, I forked the entire repo, made the necessary revision, and then created a related pull request:

Whether or not Dave actually accepts the PR is one thing, but it was really really fun to do it since I love Emacs a ton.

I also moved my own Emacs config to its own GitHub repo so that I can use ‘ihsec’ and swap Emacs configs on the fly:

Now I can finally test other people’s Emacs configs to finally maybe fix my LSP-Mode issues with autocompletion for various programming languages :)

~ Sam