Here's what keeps me busy at the moment. What?

🛬 Back from traveling prepping the next

I applied for a one year long work and travel visa for Canada and they plan to let me into the country. I plan to leave for Canada in October and there is still a lot to plan and decide. In which region, city or place do I want to stay? What long-term international health insurance suits me the best? What do I want to do in Canada? I plan to work there and hope that Thoughtworks will help me with the transition but I am not to hopeful. I am preparing my departure and have to brush up my CV. I don't look forward to all those interview processes. Luckily enough we already found someone to take over the apartment and our furniture. That's a huge time saver for me. This is a great relief for me as at work times couldn't be more stressful. I am currently in a team that has shown the biggest resistance to change I have ever seen at a client. It seems I will not be on the client for long which I don't fret. I already planned to write down some of my experiences and learnings and maybe I do that. As Thomas A. Edison said: 'I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.'. Beyond work I am coding a small backend for a non-profit organization. It is a blast for me to apply all the things I learned and challenge myself to write the best code I can. I was surprised how much I struggled with the decision on the folder structure of the project. I wanted to use a hexagonal structure but after it took me to long to decide what to name or where to put I gave up. Understand what you want to build and than create the basis structure, move forward from there. Now that the project has matured I will go attempt again. I also wanted to do it in tandem with my current mentor but he is too busy right now.

📚🎧 Reading

What am I reading right now. What I've read I list here.

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk

I wanted to read this book for a long time to understand more about myself. Reading the first chapter was already hard and I put the book aside too often for lighter fare. Van der Kolk describes the life with trauma exactly how I experienced it. As book explains treatments of what worked and what didn't I hope to learn how to better life with the trauma I experienced. Whenever I read a self-help book it is often about mentoring, learning or software development. That reading a book could be this difficult was not what I had expected. I also started to listen to the audiobook to help me get through this book.

Building a second brain by Tiago Forte

My significant other and I are regularly brunching with friends and it happened that a friend who is currently writing a sci-fi novel showed me her notes app. I was intrigued about the structure of her notes and the topics she had written about. This made me think how I am organizing my second brain and when we came back from the brunch I quickly started to set up my own self-hosted notes website(My data my privacy😤). Now that I had a notes app what would I write and how do I organize all of my notes? Luckily for me my friend also recommended me this book. Whenever I feel like I have some headspace to learn about PARA I start the audiobook and open my notes app.

Learning Test-Driven Development by Saleem Siddiqui

This book is an excuse to pick up Go, Javascript and Python and code a little outside my work. My goal is to re-visit the basics of TDD in order to learn what I might not already know. I learned test-driven development at work and I was coached by truly amazing developers. Everything I learned was when I delivered code. I recognized in conversations with client developers who disagreed with me on the benefits of it that I was not able to articulate myself good enough for my liking. I really love writing code with TDD and the languages so a little challenge can't hurt.

🎮 Video Games

It's not a good time for my sleeping schedule right now.

Homeworld 3

I was so hyped for this game and played it every waking minute since I am back from our work and travel tour in the Balkans. The campaign was shorter than anticipated and this "OMG someone is killing all planets with super weapons" move to create some tension didn't work for me. The story is mediocre at best and I believe I saw some resemblance in the movements of the animated characters which I had seen in movies. The way they moved was so extremely similar that it can't be my imagination. I don't want to add more points that shows my disappointment. I want to give this game a chance again in some month but I would rather play the previous games of the Homeworld series.

Hades 2

Another game I have eagerly awaited. The first one created the spark which finally led me enjoy rouge-like videogames. I have played only a few hours of the early-access edition and I believe it is a proper sequel. I am currently focusing on unlocking the different weapon types and not try-harding too much. I got already into the second stage after getting stomped by the headmistress. Overall I love everything about this game. It is also a reason to pick up my Steamdeck and play with it.