EN 62: A peculiar week

It’s been a peculiar week, with things to process and changes. What it was going to be a slightly anti-Cucumber post—not the vegetable—with a mix of specification by example, has been delayed. Not to worry, cucumbers are healthy and delicious with humus or just salt, and the tool can also be okay, but there are devs that only see “that” when thinking about BDD/specification by example.

What now? Why, let’s make it personal, Michael Jordan style.

I got COVID-19 a week and a half ago, it wasn’t fun. I thought once was enough, and that I was on the way to beat my record of not getting sick, but the virus had other plans. Playing the side effects roulette wasn’t in the cards, as the more you play, the more you could lose, but, luckily, I’m back to normal.

This virus is a funny one. As a kid, there was a time when I got the same recurring vivid nightmare. A pointy, black and sinister castle in the distance, with a sinuous road through the mountains leading to it. Taking cover behind a trench, my eyes followed the many curves of the road, eventually looking at the treacherous castle. The more I looked at it, the more painful my headache. As my hands covered my eyes, my body twisted, and the world spun with the slightest movement. Suddenly, there was no castle, no dream, the pain, and vertigo were the only things that managed to cross the chasm.

The two times I got the virus, I’ve experienced the same sensations but no dream. I remember trying to power through it the first time, working from home, and attempting to look at the code only to be met with vertigo and a splitting headache. The only thing I could do was to go to bed, close my eyes, trying not to move, thinking that if that was going to be my life from that point on, I was screwed. As a side note, I wonder to this day if the “brain fog” and low energy I sometimes feel (more times than I’d like) was COVID-19 related, as I don’t have a recollection of me worrying too much about it before the pandemic.

Now to other different things.

I bought gymnastic rings a few weeks ago and let me tell you, they’re fun and challenging.

I’m trying to step up my pull-ups game to eventually do one-armed pull-ups and muscle-ups. Specially for the muscle-ups, the rings are fantastic, as I can adjust the height to simplify the movement with the support of the legs and focus on the problematic parts. Also, the rings are quite fun when doing push-ups and dips, and turning the rings out takes the exercises up a notch. For the one-arm pull up, the focus is to get to eight reps of weighted pull-ups with 16kgs.

In terms of programming, there’s some progress on the Rust front. The learning routing was a bit slow these weeks, but I’m half-way through “Learn Rust in a Month of Lunches” (it’s being more than a month of lunches for me, probably with dinners as well), and having some progress with the dungeon crawler, now coding different ways to generate maps.

On the side, I started to casually read Specification By Example, my first impression is that it’s an essential book that I wish I could’ve read sooner.

Interesting links

• I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again (Ludicity)

• Live Exploratory Testing (Elizabeth Zagroba). Great example showing how exploratory testing is done. I don’t know enough about the topic, and I’m trying to learn more about software testing beyond the developer perspective, so this session was quite interesting.

• Our health crisis - which party has the best prescription for our nation’s health? (Christina Pagel). “Health is not guaranteed by check-ups and treatments. Nor is it just a factor of your genes and your individual lifestyle decisions. While those all matter, the wider context in which we live is crucial – from housing to employment to education to the environment.”