Work Journal - №2

This week was a short week for me. Monday was the MLK holiday and then today I had a hand doctor appointment so I took the morning off, and then spent the rest of the afternoon trying to get caught up.

My hand is making good progress and the bones are basically healed now, but it’s still a long process ahead. The doctor told me today that if this was my right hand, she would tell me not to shake anyone’s hand for at least four more months. To me most of my hand is doing great except the little finger. It’s still not bending and I still can’t make a fist so I have a lot more painful physical therapy in my future. The good news is that it has loosened up enough to where I can start typing with two hands. This is the first week since the accident where I could do that and that is a big win.

I’ve also kept with the iPad only. I’ve not been on any other computers in a few weeks now. Out of all my daily activities the only workflow that I struggle with is building the weekly Laravel newsletter. I use Campaign Monitor and apparently their drag/drop editor does not work with touch events. It’s quite annoying.

Drawing

I finally finished the Affinity Designer online course this week and it was very much worth the money. I feel like now I have a great grasp on how to use the app and how to create my own things pretty quickly.

Now the hard part starts where I need to take ideas and turn them into drawings. For example, today I was feeling pretty salty because my doctor appointment took all morning and then just little things got on my nerves. To help me get my mind off that I made a quick drawing representing “salty”

All my drawings are optimized for speed and I try to bang these out super quick. This one with the margarita took about 10 mins from start to finish and it shows. One day I’ll hopefully put forth the time to make a drawing much better.

I’ve also started going through a book on drawing cartoon faces which is more inline with what I want to create.

Day Job

At my day job I had to adjust our tax calculator and system because we had an employee move to a new state, which means a change in Nexus. It’s a whole crazy system but luckily the change was pretty easy. Always be testing when building an e-commerce system.

After checking out the new Laravel Mailbox package I spent some time looking at a package called mail-mime-parser that it relies on to see if I could integrate it into our app. On the surface it looks promising but I’m worried about the 10 years of edge cases we’ve had to work around and this package not catching them. But I’ll know more once I get a chance to implement it and run our weird eml’s through it.

Conclusion

This weekend I have to write the newsletter and I’m planning on deploying a top secret project I’ve had in the works since the first of the year. I’m hoping to get it all done and let you know more about it next week.

Finally, I leave you with a picture of my iPad. If your company has some extra stickers send them my way, my address is on the about page.