Publishing my book data fast and easy is still not yet done and that annoys me a lot. This morning I spent two hours trying to set up a simple MongoDB development server through Heroku. Although provisioning worked without problems, I could not connect to the instance from my computer. It complained that the credentials were wrong. I tried a few times and then gave up on this. For now. I will try again in the following days.

I got (luckily) distracted by a friendly group to learn how to create a bootloader. Saul is so generous to walk us through, how to write a “Hello World” bootloader and what it does. This setting makes things very fun, and it’s a great opportunity to learn! We walked through this code, which is probably the largest “Hello World” program that I’ve ever seen. This low level code is so full with grown conventions and “history”, it’s amazing.

In the afternoon I discussed with James and David about, the usual, how to decide on a project. They both shared some useful insights with me, such as:

  • Follow where the passion or the most interest is, because at these topics you will learn the most.
  • When you can’t decide for one main project, because it’s too big of a decision, do “timeboxing”. Which means, deciding to concetrate on something for three days, or a week. Then you can re-evaluate. This prevents questioning your decision all the time.
  • If have job-related worries: Select one day of the week (typically a Friday), to concentrate on job-related activities. This is the same strategy as above: Don’t worry during the week.
  • Share with others, what you’re working on, to find someone to pair with.
  • Sometimes it can be valuable to suffer through a problem.
  • Finishing something doesn’t have to be something big. It can be just decided as “finished”.
  • It’s a way of going with the flow, to start initiatives, “use” the motivation at the beginning, and if interest diminshes it’s ok to let go. It’s not necessary to stick with something just for the matter of sticking with it.
  • The “second half” of RC can be very stressful, but remember that the batch can also be seen as the “longest onboarding process”. So it’s still possible to make cool stuff after this time.

That’s all I have picked up today, I wonder how long it takes me to internalize this. I think some of these tipps are valuable for everything I do.

The next discussion was more technical, with Or I planned how an introduction to Networking could look like. Picking a topic and making it relevant for the audience is the challenge. We decided that a demonstration of wireshark might be a good idea: Walking through a request, which was sent with the browser, check the response, inspect all the packages from ARP request to DNS request to HTTP request and their answers.

For dinner we went out to have some chinese fast food. I was not aware of alternatives to 1$ pizza for dinner in the same price and quality range before that. David knows places which are “tourist-free”. Good to know such places. I was tempted by the small price and ordered too much. Lessons learned.