February Focus

Well February is shaping up to be a very busy month for me. Besides my two courses to finish my degree, I’ve got one credit hour left to earn, so I’ll be taking a 2-day bootcamp on R near the end of the month. That same week, I’ve got to take my college exit exam. In addition to that, PennyKoin has been revived, so the team is debugging a wallet bug that is burning payments, and also forking Monero as the base for a new chain that we’ll be swapping to. And if that wasn’t enough, I took on digital director duties for a school board campaign. I must be crazy.

But wait, there’s more. I’m setting up a WordPress site for the local Democratic Party. I was Sergeant At Arms previously, but had to drop that. I’ll be working with a steering committee and doing the technical work to guide them through customizing a theme I picked out an setting up operations on it. I also promised I’d submit a merge to the Python TDAmeritrade API library.

I’m really having to dig into C++ between my course on scientific computing and Pennykoin. It’s so different coming back from spending so much time on Python. I’m still reading through Clean Code and the Gang of Four’s Design Pattern book to try and figure out how to abstract my code and get rid of code duplication. My other class, a group development project, is basically going to be a social networking app running in a Django setup. I’m going to be demoing Cookie Cutter Django and a Docker setup for the prototype presentation on Thursday after I finish the first revision of my software design spec.

My boss had a lot of questions for me earlier this week about my post-graduation plans. Our company still isn’t making any money (or so he claims), and I was honest with him that I can expect a six figure salary after graduation. I told him that I wasn’t going to abandon him, but that I thought our business model was a dead-end. I suggested a pivot to business process automation, and alluded to trying to some steps that we could do to open up the web-page maintenance business. We’ve been shoveling off any web development requests that our clients have had, and it’s probably been the wrong move. We’ve got a pretty big marketing funnel, and so I suggested that we scrape all of the web domains in our database and run them through a WordPress vulnerability scanner and see what we get. Low hanging fruit and all that.

Lastly, I can’t wait to listen to this episode of Unconfirmed about employment in the blockchain industry. I think in some sense, that’s where all the work I’ve been doing recently has been heading. It seems so obvious right now. Between the stuff I’ve been doing with Pennykoin, the trading algorithms I made for my brokerage, and the infrastructure work, it’s obvious that’s where I want to go. I’ve got a connection also that I’m going to pursue.

Right after I knock some other things off my todo list.

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