Starting to Share Something Every Day!

⊕ show captionAbout the Photo // I improvised this chicken pot pie from scratch, making a roux and adding chicken broth, and pouring it over pre-cooked vegetables to make a hearty filling. Then I shared it with visiting family, and we ate the whole thing!!!

Mrah! It’s been a minute! I’ve been busy so here’s a recap on various Sri goings-on since (gasp) August 23!!!

Surprise! I Applied for a Job!

I wasn’t thinking about applying for a job, but one popped up that made me think of a completely different career path! Rather than try to bundle being a developer or designer into a cat-sized entity running a shop, why not try being a community-facing employee for an organization that does good things? So I mobilized all energies toward making an applications!

Now, it’s been a very long time since I last had to apply for a job, so my resume was super old and not in a format designed for today’s Application Tracking Systems (ATS). Also, I didn’t have a current online portfolio or a way to share files privately. My old website ran on WordPress and it was easy to add and update pages. My current website here at dsriseah.com is built completely differently, so I spent 10 days rebuilding what I had lost as quickly as possible. The result is a more capable website and a passable portfolio. I also learned that it’s entirely OK to have a two-three page resume that is simple Google Doc, and that having any kind of two-column design made with something like Illustrator actually hurt the ATS system’s ability to suck in data.

Anyway, long story short is that I didn’t get the job, so I am back to my default plan of becoming a rogue creative entity rebuilding my skillset. The value of doing the application was that consider a new pivot and created the infrastructure to support future job applications!

September 9 Groundhog Day Resolution Insights!

In that report, I decided that keeping my aspirations limited to a few thingsThese being the Deno Web App (for programming chops and app building), the Web Revival Group (a pilot in-personal organization that I can run), and PKMS Packaging (a sharable public version of this website’s features). These all support my current ambitions and support each other as well. was just fine, but I added a new directive:

This Week’s Shares

I started following this directive this past Monday, but have failed to report what I’ve been doing. So here I go!

MONDAY

• Made a worksheet for my Graphic Design Basics course, which is part of The Tiny School concept that I’m piloting with visiting family! The worksheet is to help with Lesson 02’s concepts involving editing nodes. The file is lab-node-editing.pdf
• Wrote an exploratory review of Polymathy and published it as an outline. I had noticed a few videos on YouTube talking about it and found that there were some similarities to the way I thought, so why not dive in and see what’s there?

TUESDAY

• Drew a picture of a “Pop Cat” based on an illustration I like a lot from smolbeanfriend on Etsy! I would like to be able to draw cats like this! I drew it as part of DS|CAFE’s new Art Tuesdays, where we try to get together in the same video chat room between 12:00 and 4:00PM (Eastern Time).
• Made a chicken pot pie from scratch (see photo at the top), starting by making a roux and cooking all the incredients. The one thing I didn’t do was actually make the pie crust, and I cheated a bit by including some frozen peas and corn to add some color. I shared it with visiting family, who declared it was very yummy! However, I still have not achieved my ultimate goal of creating the chicken pot pie from my school cafeteria in Taiwan, which was a stout free-standing pastry that didn’t ooze like a sad souffle.
• I stayed up late and got the “minimum viable prototype” (MVP) working for the Deno Web App, which is a big win!

WEDNESDAY

• I had a bad bout of bronchitis and didn’t finish anything shareworthy. I focused on acquiring cough drops, heating pads, and breath warmers instead.

THURSDAY

• I officially uploaded MVP for the Deno Web App, which finally has a real name: Sri-Box! The repo is also at codeberg.org/dsriseah/dsri-box! It still has a kind of “code smell” to it, but it runs. The first of many steps!
• I researched and wrote the first page of the associated wiki. The Repo Structure and Conventions distills my working assumptions about the code. Susan from DS|CAFE, who has a lot of experience with public projects, was a helpful sounding board for anticipating collaboration challenges. We’ll see what Susan thinks should she review it.

Tomorrow I’ll be making another long drive to help out family, so I’m not expecting to get anything done. I think it’s been a pretty good week. If I can maintain a similar pace, perhaps my long-stalled dreams will start to untangle. That’s the big big wish, anyway!