Author: rachelgeist

Remote Work Day 27: Six Weeks In

Remote Work Day 27: Six Weeks In

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It’s sunny and nice-esque out. It’s still a bit chilly, but it’s sunny. It’s sunny! Hurrah! Well, overall there’s not a ton to update, surprise surprise. I can’t believe it’s been six weeks already. It seems like it’s been forever since I’ve been working at home. Some days are harder than others when it comes to getting Ellie’s school completed and working. I just have to keep reminding myself productivity looks different right now. We’re still working. Boo’s still learning. Calvin’s still napping.

Since I could turn crabby here, I’m going to list a few things that I’ve enjoyed having around at home and am thankful for:

  • My family. Even if they drive me nuts 60% of the time.
  • My kitty. Even though he is a punk and bites sometimes.
  • My job. I’ve been able to keep working and learning.
  • My yard. It’s so nice and green now and all fenced in. It’s great to be able to sit in the back yard.
  • My new robot vacuum. It’s so nice to have floors clean with minimal effort.

More next time! I think that next post I’ll share my thoughts on git rebase vs git merge. I know you’ll be on the edge of you seat with anticipation!

-Rachel

Remote Work Day 17: Still at Home Learning

Remote Work Day 17: Still at Home Learning

by rachelgeist ♥ 2 Comments

Hey All! It’s been a few since I’ve been on here. My goal was to write every day, but you know what? Being home every day just working doesn’t exactly lend itself to riveting storytelling or edge-of-your-seat intrigue. This would be the part in the book that is skipped over in a brief sentence or so. “Weeks from working from home passed until one day. . .” So yeah, sorry. (Not that sorry)

a teal box with an assortment of snacks sitting on a countertop
Work sent a snack box to everyone. It was awesome!

It’s been really nice to see Ellie learn on a daily basis and be a part of her education. I have also really enjoyed just having her around. I know this seems to be the opposite of what most people are saying nowadays, but I miss Ellie a lot during the days when I’m at work. She’s a hoot to be around and is very good at entertaining herself most of the time. This isn’t meant to be a brag or anything, just what’s currently going on.

Overall, I’ve enjoyed working remotely even with the added layer of being teacher. That being said, I’ll be very glad when she’s able to be schooled normally again. Forsooth, I am not an educator. Eighty percent of who she’s learning from is from Ms. YouTube (at least on my end. Brett takes over educating after lunch). Her being the social butterfly she is really misses her friends and getting out. She’s been sending friends and family Marco Polo messages to stay in touch.

I’ve also liked the flexible working schedule. I still stick to my normal hours for consistency, but I can sit out on the deck and work if I wanted to. I can get some laundry started when I’m on a quick break. I do miss being around my co-workers and being able to have the more organic chats about problems. Zoom meetings are just more formal and intentional since you have to find a time that works and have a purpose for them (even if it is just to chat and catch up).

Work-wise, I’m learning more and more about how to set up data for tests and writing tests, and debugging tests. That’s all new and exciting. I don’t have a ton to report on that since I’m still figuring it out and developing an understanding of it. I’ve had to remind myself over and over that learning is hard. Learning takes time and is a process. I can’t know everything immediately.

What have you been learning about? Either from your work from home experience or at work? Let me know!

-Rachel

Remote Work Day 8: Outside!

Remote Work Day 8: Outside!

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Well yesterday was nothing to sing about. It was cold and gross and I worked from home. Whee.

Today, though! Today was nice. It was sunny! It was warm! Ellie did really well on homeschooling! I took my laptop out on the back porch and worked the rest of the afternoon from outside. I wore my sun hat. It was amazing.

One thing that I signed Ellie up for a few months ago and we have all been enjoying is the Kiwi Crate (that’s a referral link there). She looks forward to them and they’re really well constructed and she learns about different topics. This one was about exploring stars. She made a lantern and a little gear thing that showed how the earth orbits the sun and how the moon orbits the earth.

Work was pretty good. I got two MRs approved and merged today. Yay! Work has been so so good about providing resources for working from home and making this time as good as possible. And it’s days like these that it’s actually pretty enjoyable to be at home with everyone. Yay sun! Yay outside! Yay being able to watch Ellie play outside while working!

Remote Work Day 6: Week Two Begins

Remote Work Day 6: Week Two Begins

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I didn’t write anything Friday. I was strung pretty tight Friday what with the stay at home order announcement. And nothing really happened anyway.

Today I played the game of “don’t mess with your dock” which involved me figuring out why my laptop died and monitor wouldn’t work. All me being dumb with the dock. All resolved.

Ellie started homeschool today. It wasn’t too bad. She really enjoyed it. I kind of split my time in the morning and then Brett did the other part of it with her in the afternoon. I found out I probably should have gotten her a headset and turns out that there’s a verrrry slim selection available on amazon at the moment. I wonder why they’re all gone. Probably to do with everyone working from home. Probably. Just a guess.

She says she feels like she learned things today, so I guess that’s good.

More tomorrow!

-Rachel

Remote Work Day 4: Hot Tub Time Machine

Remote Work Day 4: Hot Tub Time Machine

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Ugh, another rainy and gross day. Ellie is getting bored and cagey. I had a couple of meetings at work in addition to standup, so that was more busy than the past few days. Putting pants on is still helpful with the work mindset. Boundaries are hard. It’s not easy to be cooped up in the guest room for long-ish periods of time with a five year old either in the room or wanting to com into the room.

One nice thing about today was that towards the end of the day it stopped raining, the sun came out, and it was pleasantly warm out. Humid as none other, but whatevs.

Ellie and I swam in the hot tub for a while before bed. I figure it’s a good way to disinfect every day by sitting in a tub of chlorine water. Eh, it can’t hurt. Too bad that our hot tub doesn’t time travel. But really, if it actually did, do you think anyone would believe us six months ago? And who would I talk to about it? The mayor? I guess it’s best that the ol’ hot tub stays fixed in time. I’d have a fairly difficult time trying to convince anyone about all this mess.

That’s about it for today, other than there’s not a scrap of toilet paper at Meijer or Walmart. No squares to spare. Not even one.

-Rachel

Remote Work Day 3: Rainy Day

Remote Work Day 3: Rainy Day

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Well, I got my morning “commute” in just before it started raining this morning. And boy did it rain today. Ellie was my “helper” again today. I’ve discovered she loves Zoom meetings and is the little Zoom meeting Ham. She’ll dance in the background and then want to crawl up on my lap and make faces. Overall, it’s not terribly distracting and I have myself muted most of the time, so it seems to be fine for now.

Turns out to get myself in the working mood I have to put actual pants on. No sweatpants! When the work day is done, I put on my sweatpants. It’s been working out so far.

Workstation-wise, I added my diffuser into the mix. It’s nice to have some different smells going on in the guest room. Today was grapefruit, bergamot, and ho wood. Ellie has commandeered the guest-room bed and it now has a lot of Barbies on it. They also worked from home today.

Exercise-wise I did get a run in after it stopped raining. It was drizzling a bit but I trudged through “running” my mile and called that good.

More tomorrow!

-Rachel

Remote Work Day 2: Sunny Day

Remote Work Day 2: Sunny Day

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It was really nice outside today weather-wise. I got to have the curtains open and actually see the sun and people walking their dogs. I went on my commute walk again, which was nice. I am wondering what I’ll do for that the next couple of days since it is supposed to be rainy. Maybe I’ll drive by Micky D’s for a breakfast sandwich. . .

I decided to just work the rest of the week and removed my time off days I had put in. Our plans to go to Chicago got busted and it’s supposed to be raining the rest of the week. What else would I be doing? I figure when there’s a couple of nice days I’ll take those off so we can go outside.

Working remotely has been nice today since I was able to get a ton of work in this morning and have a bit more flexibility with the afternoon and letting Ellie go outside for a bit. It was very enjoyable to be able to sit outside and have the sun feel warm. Right now I’m learning about and writing tests. That’s something new that I’ve been interested about but never really had the time to actually do them.

Oh, and if you like a good dashboard, here’s a nice one from Johns Hopkins: coronavirus dashboard

More tomorrow!

-Rachel

Remote Work Day One: Here We Go

Remote Work Day One: Here We Go

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So it has come to this. As of today, I’m remote full-time until shrugs because of, you know, COVID-19 and social distancing. It’s all good. Work’s been really good about providing a lot of resources for a successful transition to being remote full time, which I really appreciate. They even have resources for keeping your kids engaged during the day while you work! I figured that I’d document how the process goes here as something to do in the evenings as my evening schedule has cleared dramatically.

Anyhoo, I’ve worked remote before, but never long term; just a day at a time every so often. So this is going to be new. The first thing I did was get the guest room actually set up as an office. You can see what I’ve done with the space below.

A home office with a cat sitting on the desk where the computer mouse is.
Here’s my remote office. Kitty and all!

Today has been picking a work from home schedule and seeing what it’s like. I got dressed in regular work clothes today and Ellie and I went on a walk for our “commute” to start the day. I think that both of those things helped a lot with getting the right mindset for work.

Then biggest challenge is going to be keeping Ellie occupied and engaged with things to do while I work. Brett is a good helper in this regard, but the guest room is now a big draw for her since I’m in it most of the day. Today went decently well, but she definitely wanted to sit and snuggle and “help” me a lot.

Anyhoo, if you’re interested in how I fare, stay tuned here!

-Rachel

New Job Alert!

New Job Alert!

by rachelgeist ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Hey All! I know I’ve been a bit AFK here recently, but there’s been a lot going around here recently. The biggest is that I got a new job! I started February 24th and have really been enjoying it so far. I’m working in a much larger environment with a bigger team, which has been exciting. It’s really nice having other people around to ask questions about Python again.

It was a big decision to start looking for a new job, but I knew that it was time to make the next step in my career. Looking back on it, here’s a few things I took away from it.

Be persistent. There’s going to be rejection. Don’t let the Muggles get you down.

Always be looking. You never know when the right job is going to be posted. Keep an eye and an ear out!

Keep your resume up-to-date. If you’re always looking around you want to make sure your resume is ready to go for applying right away.

Use networking to your advantage. This was is harder for me because I can tend to hermit it up. Start going to events (try looking at Meetup.com or whatever) in your town that’s relevant to your career interests. Talk to and get to know people at other companies.

Practice interview skills. Play around at hackerrank.com or similar to get confident about your problem skills. That site also has good interviewing tips too.

Be confident. This one is also hard for me. I can imposter syndrome hard and assume everyone is smarter and better than me. But hey! That’s not true.

So hopefully you find the above encouraging. I’ll try and start posting a bit more regularly again shortly.

-Rachel

Render JavaScript Within Flask

Render JavaScript Within Flask

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So a while ago I wanted to use some JavaScript to do some auto-filtering on a dropdown box I had in Flask. However, this wasn’t a static JavaScript file, I needed some dynamic-ness based on some other functionality and couldn’t just serve up a static JavaScript file. What I found was that there weren’t a lot of good examples for what I wanted to accomplish. Most of the examples you see are html files with JavaScript in the script tags. Which is cool, I just didn’t want to do it that way.

First, write up your JavaScript and stick it in with your templates. I had to use $.getJSON(), so the dynamic part of my JavaScript within Flask looked like below. Basically it is querying my database and grabbing applicable data based on a previous user selection. I’m doing the grabbing with Flask and the making with JavaScript. If that makes sense. And please pardon my lack of technical JavaScript terminology.

// your_javascript.js
$.getJSON("{{ url_for('main._get_stuff') }}", send, function(data) {
            data.forEach(function(item) {
                dropdown.foo.append(
                    $('<option>', {
                        value: item[0],
                        text: item[1]
                    })
                );
            });
            dropdown.foo.removeAttr('disabled');
        });

Then you’ll want to render your JavaScript where your routes live. Mine looks similar to this:

@main.route('/some_route_you_chose')
def render_that_javascript():
    return render_template('your_javascript.js')

In the template you want your JavaScript in, put the url_for your rendered JavaScript in your block for scripts:

{% block scripts %}
<script src="{{ url_for('main.some_route_you_chose') }}"></script>
{% endblock %}

There you go. Flask rendering JavaScript that needed some dynamic content. Hopefully if you were trying to figure this out yourself you found it helpful. More next time!

-Rachel