Jayden Journal Public Access: Winter 2024

Published: 2023-12-02

I’m gonna tell you what I’ll be up to.

I usually write daily, weekly, and seasonal goals in my Journal. But for those of you who are curious and for the extra added accountability of sharing what I’m doing publicly, I thought I’d be a interesting idea to share my winter seasonal goals with all of you who are curious.

But before we get into what I’ll be up to, we need to talk about what I’ve been up to.

What I’ve been up to (Fall 2023)

I was able to get a lot of good and important work done, although I fell quite short on the amount of personal/hobby work I was able to accomplish.

School/Work

For my current internship, I’ve been doing a great job. My Manager had said I could return for another 4 months I wanted to, but I chose to do another 4 months in another team. The two other interns an I are working on a big end of term project. I can give a brief review of my time at Scotiabank on the Application Security Team.

Not exactly sure how much I can share but:

Brief review of my Scotiabank AppSec Engineering Internship

I was concerned that we were going to be coding on locked-down bank Thinkpads that you had to send a request to install ANYTHING on (aside: Thinkpad names after 2020 are terrible and they should’ve just wrapped around to calling them T400’s again or something.). Other departments had been using Macbooks, and some teams from our department also had Macbooks.

Turns out my team works in… Linux? They had come up with a workaround to Thinkpad development involving asking to install virtualbox, and doing everything inside a virtual machine. It worked quite well, and bypassed a lot of the bureaucracy in corporate development. I had superuser privileges and could do whatever I wanted inside my VM.

The Senior dev on my team was big on everyone knowing what they were doing and how, so everyone sets up their environment themselves. So there was a MASSIVE document on our teams documentation about ALL the steps you needed to:

• Make a linux vm.
• Make a shared folder with the windows install.
• Partition your drives manually.
• Set up the bank proxy so we could access internal tools.
• Set up EVERY development tool we’d needed.

It was a lot. And I had to do it twice (tell you to give yourself a drive of 10GB, and adding extra space broke the partitions).

But it was a great solution! I could do whatever I wanted to in it. I think we were the only team that used this dev environment. I was also nice that our main dev environment was in linux because we worked a lot with linux servers. Lots of ssh’ing and working in the terminal (All my time using Vim for fun finally paid off). I became much more comfortable with working in the terminal, and I also started to use Docker, something I probably wouldn’t have ever thought about in my own personal projects, being in a DevOps team has shown me the value of it (writing images for ALL my big projects from now on).

Our big term project is making a Next.js app to allow the team to simplify getting software scan data. I had wanted to use SvelteKit but the other two interns had no experience with svelte, but did have experience with react , so I picked Next.js instead (I’m a certified react hater).

My team is also great! My senior manager is really cool and we bonded over Quake and Godot and… Strong Bad from Homestar Runner? The Senior Development Lead was also very cool and inspirational, watching him in action was cool and I still have some cool linux tricks up my sleeve because of him. He’s the 2nd person I’ve seen who uses the i3 tiling window manager, with the other being James Scholz, the YouTuber who streams his study sessions. With 100% of i3 users I know being cool and inspirational, I’ve installed i3 on my framework laptop.

Overall great time. I’m moving to the Java Event Layer team january, it seems like they use a lot of boomer legacy tools and languages. It’s in the Digital department, which is the hip modern tech startup-y sister office down the street, and it also means I’m working on systems that end-users interact with, so let’s see how that goes.

Okay I think that’s it.

As for school, I was doing full time co-op so not much to report.

Also got back into Leetcode. Working through the Neetcode 150 Roadmap. It’s definitely what I’d suggest to anyone who’s looking to get into Leetcode. I’m putting this under school/work because honestly if It wasn’t for these being asked in job interviews I wouldn’t be doing them. Considering I have 1 more internship lined up after this one my motivation to do these has plummeted, but I’ll try to stay consistent.

GDYU

GDYU did great from September through November. I expected the server to pick up activity once fall rolled around and such was the case. We had a tremendous turnout at Yorkfest (the club tabling event in september), with having over 153 new server members and 265 people join a raffle for a exclusive scrimblo Totebag. The Merch on our table has still not been released. I’m sorry.

My goal this seasons with GDYU was consistency. Come up with pipelines and ways we organize things to ensure things go as we’d like them to and we can have a be consistent and stable for our members. Although things still do kinda operate under a “It’d be cool if we did x” and then x happens, we have a lot of staple events, like our semester end jams, GESC, yudum dare, GDCYU, and the drawpile evenings.

Our Unity workshops in November also showed us that there are holes for GDYU to fill in the Digital Media department. GDYU is still quite separate from the Digital Media and game development departments at york and that’s something I’m still trying to fix.

There’s also our lack of social presence. We don’t really have social media or use Lassonde channels for advertising which also stifles our reach.

We also Launched wiki.gdyu.club, a markdown book that has archives of workshops and resources from GDYU members for GDYU members. I hope other people start contributing to it soon, Github workflows aren’t that hard to use… right?

I’m VERY happy with our executive team and am excited for the new things GDYU will be up to.

Hobbies

This is where the sacrifices went unfortunately. I consider the work I spend my time on in 3 tiers: Work I’m obligated to do (like school/job work), work other people benefit from (like GDYU), and work I do for myself because I enjoy it.

When time is limited and I have to choose I’m generally going to focus on the work that can benefit others (when it comes to school and my job, I don’t usually have a choice).

I had a few goals this season, one of them was to get more confident with backend web development, something I though I’d have to spend time making practice projects for, but I’ve found hackathons and my work at Scotia to be great times to practice skills like server side code, api’s, and databases. Although I’m not at the point I’d like to be, I’m confident I’ll be able to learn things as I need to use them.

Speaking of Hackathons, I had attended Hack the North and Hack the Valley. Both great times. Although they’re quite exhausting, so I likely won’t do more then one hackathon a month.

Another was to try to get into lower-level development, specifically with Rust. I had been working through the Rust book, and the Rust community has come up with all sorts of interesting and cool ways to go about teaching Rust. I think low-level development is very interesting, and I wanted to build a chip-8 emulator, (although technically it would be a chip-8 interpreter) and also potentially a GameBoy emulator.

I’ve done neither. I think the idea is cool but I’m choosing to spend my time elsewhere for now.

In a similar vein, I also wanted to get a better understanding of the Godot game engine. I want to learn how it works, and get familiar with the source code. Being a godot contributor would be extremely cool, and It’s something I’d like to be able to do.

I haven’t done any looking at the Godot source code, and I’ve barley worked on any godot projects. I do have one interesting game idea but I haven’t been able to give it the time it deserves. I really hope that changes next season.

I also picked Drawing back up, as I wanted to spend time on a hobby that didn’t involve programming.

This happened during the season so I had no specific goals set. But I resumed Drawabox from my 9-month long Hiatus since my lesson 5 submission. Because Drawabox forces you to spend 50% of your total drawing time on drawing for fun, I wanted to get to work on some comics! I’ve always loved comics and manga, and I think they’ll be a great way for me to practice my drawing.

I’ve been keeping track of characters and worldbuilding with obsidian, and to for research, had read Understanding Comics and Making Comics by Scott McCloud. They might be some of my favorite books of all time. Scott’s level of understanding is unmatched, demonstrable by his extremely easy to understand explanations of ideas that likely took him years to distill into the form they’re in now. As comics about comics, I recommend them to anyone who reads comics or manga and wants to understand the nuances we usually never consider. the latter book (Making Comics) is a great read to those who’re interested in giving them a try. I won’t spend too much time talking about these books as I’ll likely release a book review on them in a future post.

Health

I spend a lot of time at my desk. I try to take breaks whenever possible, and usually set a 10 minute break every 50 minutes. I also drink a lot of water, so that’s pretty good. I’ve been doing yoga in my room on my lunch break, focusing on stretches that help deal with area’s affected by sitting for as long as I do (I spend like 12 hours a day at my desk).

I’m also trying to focus less on comparison, of others, regardless of if I think someone is doing something better or worse then I am. I think comparison takes away the sense of personal accomplishment you get after doing something, because you’re only concerned about how it compares to others accomplishments. It’s been something I’ve been doing for a while, and am trying to not do that anymore.

Other cool things I did.

My Framework 13 finally showed up. It ironically most resembles a Macbook. I’d give a more in-depth review but I’ll save it for it’s own post later. That, and I’ve barley used the thing aside from (mostly) setting up my operating system. I’ve just been at home a lot these days and use my desktop PC.

I also got a Steam Deck around last week! It’ll allow me to play my steam library while I’m out, which will hopefully let me play more games. I’d really like to write about the games I play, but I haven’t really been playing a lot these last 3 months, hopefully it’ll let me spend some more time gaming.

I also went to my first concert!!! I saw Sungazer at the Axis club with the only other Sungazer fan I knew who also happened to be a good friend (thank you for existing, other Sungazer fan friend, and paying for half my uber home because the GO train stopped running at 11pm on weekdays. I appreciate you). The show was great, Jazz-fusion lends itself well to live performances, being very different from the recordings you’re used to listening to. Not sure when another artist I’m interested in will be playing in Toronto, but I’ll try to make it!

That took a while to write.

Let’s finally get to what this blog post is really about:

What I will be up to: Winter 2024.

School/Work

My goal is to end off my current co-op term well and do my winter co-op term as well as I can.

I’m also interested in potentially studying abroad, so I’ll need to put in an application for that.

Also… do Leetcodes. 😔

GDYU

There have been two GDYU projects I’ve been wanting to launch but haven’t. One of them is the Merch we had shown off at Yorkfest, the other is something we haven’t revealed yet.

I’d also like to use our social media as well as post in lassonde club channels, which will hopefully increase community outreach.

Another thing is more casual in-person events. A very surprising amount of people seem to show up to them, especially when food is involved. We’ll be having another club birthday party in january, as well as another GDCYU. The UofT game development club has a Event where people just gather on campus and work on their projects. I think we could try something like that, it’ll encourage more people to make games.

Speaking of opportunities to make games, not only do we have our end of semester jam, but we’re also potentially working on some events with the Game dev department. We will share when we’re able to.

Something that looking at game development clubs from other Ontario Universities has shown me is GDYU has a lack of industry connections. I think that’s also something we can work towards, either having professionals talk at our club events or having them judge our game jam submissions. We’ll see.

Also as a personal goal, I need to make sure I’m playing more members games and giving them feedback! If you’ve ever posted something in showcase and I didn’t check it out, I’m sorry. I’ll try to make it NEVER happens again.

Hobbies

I want to make a jaydenpb.net mailing list. All it does is send you an email when a new post comes out. I would also like to be consistent in releasing one blog post a month.

I’d also like to make another Godot game. Our Jam would be a good opportunity for that, or it could be the project I’ve been slowly working at for a bit now. I’d just like to release SOMETHING, as the last prototype I released was in May. I’d want it to be a complete-ish game, not just mechanical concepts, but levels you can play and enjoy. I’d also like to start learning how to contribute to Godot, and submit a PR. That might be too ambitious for a 3 month period though. For now I’d like to not have Godot as neglected as it has been these last 3 months.

As for Drawabox and drawing, I’d like to get Lesson 5 complete. I was assigned revisions but haven’t done them yet. Completing the 250 Cylinder Challenge would also be great but It’s really hard to tell how much free time I’ll have these next 3 months. I’d also like to start working on comic pages, not too sure how long they’ll take but I’ll stick to a likely achievable number, like… 8?

I’d also like to finish setting up the Framework 13 and use it more. I’m also interested in moving from Gnome to i3 and from the gnome-terminal to Alacritty on my desktop computer as well. Considering I already have my config files for both it shouldn’t be too hard (let’s see how well that ages).

Health

I want to do an L-Sit!!! Not sure how far I can get but I’ll keep working though the progressions. I’d also like to raise my max pull-up count to 10 in a row. Doing them with a weighted vest could work (or I could attach weights to myself, lol).

I also need to get better at having a “Quitting Time”. Most days I just finish up when I finish everything on my daily todo, which ends up being around the time I have to go to sleep. I think having a time where I put down my work and relax would be good for me.

Also eat more vegetables.

Conclusion

If you’ve made it this far, thank you.

After writing this post I’m considering doing 3 4-month long seasons instead of 4 3-month long ones. I wouldn’t want to fill my blog with posts all about me, but I guess that’d encourage me to write more consistently? I don’t know.

That’s all for now, feel very free to bug me about the progress on any of the goals I’ve written.