So, Hi Again 👋
It's been a little while.
I haven't finished Advent of Code, and I won't finish any time soon. The last half-dozen unfinished puzzles are difficult. Really difficult. I lost some motivation on my holiday road trip, and lost most of the rest shortly thereafter: having to research things like Set Theory on my own just wasn't appealing.
The puzzles aren't going anywhere, of course, so when I am more experienced and have had a chance to study more complex algorithms and programming concepts, I can mop up those last pesky stars. What a great experience it was, trying to keep up with each new day's puzzle and tackling problems I had never seen before.
And Then, January 🥶
Last month (January) was a bit of a mess. It may have been a reaction to the prior 12+ months of intense studying and learning, or it might have been disappointment from a challenging job search in a difficult market for beginners; or, some of both, plus other stuff. Whatever the causes, I ended up backing away completely from job hunting, coding, cloud, and learning. Instead, I dove deep into my newest (as of last summer) passion: FPV, or first-person view, quadcopters.
That's my current vehicle, although it's about to get some new hardware soon. There were several topics related to FPV quads that I wanted to dig into, and so that's what January ended up being all about.
Which Leads To... 💡
... a project idea!
One of the things I learned to do last month was to set up my radio receiver (the big remote controller in my hands) to log telemetry transmitted from the quad during flight. There are some interesting parameters that get measured and sent to the radio, chief among them being GPS coordinates. This got me thinking about how I might be able to display and analyze the information from a flight.
Enter Streamlit. This python framework looks like a pretty simple way to put data visualization in a browser window. I'm excited to dig into the docs.
My app is in its infancy (literally, I wrote the first few lines of code before work this morning), but I can't wait to flesh it out and do something interesting with it. I have a few big ideas that might be really cool, if I can figure out how to get them to work. So far:
Wrap-up 🍩
I don't know what my next job search steps are. I'm feeling a little gun-shy about applying for jobs, at least until I get some more outside perspectives (which I'm working on). I'm not putting everything on hold, because I really, really want to get into tech and out of retail. I am, however, trying to be slightly more balanced in my approach. I've been neglecting some personal development things for far too long, and my mental health has suffered enough in the past two years that I recognize the need for more intentional self-care during this process.
Someday, the right person will notice what I've been up to and will want to talk to me. Not sure how that will happen, but I'm going to keep moving forward in the meantime.
Onward and upward!
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