This is the fourth and last post in a series of four articles
about how I came to appreciate software technology watch
as part of a tailored-made self-education process,
deemed bearable with regard to mental health
in the context of my line of work since 2009.
The first article, the second one,
and the third one are also available nearby.
By subscribing to Sioukam’s Letter
(low volume as “in once every two months at most“ from now on),
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Approximate reading time : 10 min
Readers I had in mind when drafting:
craft·wo·men longing for life - work balance ⚖
Overall progress in this series: 4 / 4
🟩🟩🟩🟩
Tags: #MentalHealth #Toolbox
Fortunately, some of these "free as in freedom" experiments
mentioned in previous articles led me straight to collaborating with Sylvaine in eventually automating @revue_2_presse with effort aiming at freeing ourselves a little from a common desire to figure at a single glance what might have mattered a bit to the eyes of folks active on Twitter and showing interests daily towards specific press releases mirroring posts, by galvanizing their visibility with as many retweets and impressions.
Revue-de-presse.org is one of our earliest pet project, a spin-off of what I had naively in mind in 2015 when I could not read technical blogs nor social networks feeds in some of the underground metro tunnels not covered by any telecom services,
existing only to give satisfaction to a curiosity either activated by the job during the day or some of the previous days by having to conclude either with the help of former colleagues or on my own, when some customers' implementations ever felt like missing something, or were flawed in plain and simple terms, by the lack of upfront experimental pretotyping (?) or more abruptely by the lack of actual paying customers 🥺💸.
Nothing that debates with peers and knowledgeable mentors, could not have contributed to prevent in hypothetical replays, or could not have been shared in turn as a learning opportunity with others in the context of a community.
Surely, I was blessed in some way with the privilege to have only this funny even though futile side-project to think of at times, and I considered myself lucky back then and today still 😊🍀, even though this unfortunate train of thought also led me and most importantly my family who asked for nothing more than a couple of times in going through rather peculiarly hard times (read occupational burnout syndrom, which I've learned to recognize the earliest signs since then as it starts to get really well documented).
I ought to say out loud now or rather in black virtual ink that no software project either in the context of some for-profit organization or some not-for-profit organization, will ever be worth burning oneself over.
I believe (and hope a little) that Covid crisis taught us that much.
Anyway, back to the original topic:
[I'm really making an effort in *trying* to leave breadcrumbs here and there in this write-up 🥖, please trust me 😂]
I had decided to call it something -this 140-characters at the time short messages curation app thingy- well beyond the fact that we are to remember how hard things are when it comes to naming them as leitmotiv (no pressure again when one has to cherry-pick words 😤).
And that was a truthy statement in my mind until Hadrien MP. enlightened us during one of his dear programming katas teaching this trick consisting of giving whatever name crosses one's mind only to keep making progress and before making sure that one iterates over said name again, and again, and again etc.
Us as in a merry team of programmers at Evaneos in 2019 - some great folks over there 🤗)
Not without some lack of modesty in the process, behold
a command-line application dedicated
to technology watch by (Twitter) list construction 🎉
Oppositely to the all-encompassing and universal Gartner magic quadrants,
I was fantasizing about something tailored to the subtleties of an illusionary yet personal microcosmos. The latter has to be personal in the sense that Twitter, the social network might have figured how to profile someone for targeted advertising 🎯 by remixing weak signals decanting over the course of few weeks, months, years of overlayed timelines re-visiting acts. Could such period reveal a need for well deserved (timeline) resets at the individual level?
Are we not idle time travelers equipped with portable alpha-version time machines (?) 😱😉 however shy concerned individuals would be in accessing noisy bits and pieces in block/ignore/mute/read/relay/write mode depending on random variations like the weather and, more and more obviously deterministic (climate) emergencies
on the rise 🥵, while experiencing this strange apprehensive feeling of being more annoying to the many than entertaining to the few (or the contrary for the luckiest ones among us) instead of providing with worthy re-publishing in the shape of likes and such, sorted by time of publication or a magic sauce sorting criteria. 🛑
To put it midly, this CLI app was an HTTP client purposefully limited before being wrapped in a PHP console application. It was limited in the sense that it didn't have to do much more that what was required by Sylvaine and I, since the project inception,
a fancy word for a rather dull project, which can be described with wording along the lines of "expected to serve 10 tweets a day from 94 French Social Media accounts after being sorted by popularity solely defined by retweet counters stopped around midgnight, right before taking pictures worth a few hundred words and resetting the counters".
👍🏼 Kuddos to the Symfony community for making such thing as trivially possible i.e.
by requiring to have a good look at the official framework components documentation. I'm quite certain that I'll keep in love with this community for a while for the sake of this convincing argument (knowing that I'll find kind support among community members whenever I'll need some). 💗
⚠ PHP is not always synonymous with kind words nor it is always associated with much forgiving folklore stories either -ℹ slight euphemism here 😬🙉- and Symfony contributors most certainly did a lot in cancelling out negative vibes with each of their long series of generous actions, public initiatives carried out in favor of community members.
I believe that I owe positive feelings to this language for past, present and future selves, friends and colleagues, who took benefit from learning it and also had some fun in the midst of the underlying ecosystems growing out of its intricacies - even when those are regularly covered by moderate and clairvoyant community critics
in much broader context.
Such positive feelings surely originate from deeply rooted social innovations,
one may witness as many extensions branching out of
an original and successful language history made possible by
its creator,
its maintainers,
its sponsors and
its ecosystem at large,
breaking new grounds regularly in even positive ways
Please note that I intent to refer exlusively to what I've heard of,
even though I guess there are plenty more interleaved initiatives
of equal worth out there going the same way.
[...] Now reverting again to this CLI app, which helped me in accessing Twitter via those filtering views based on native lists attached to this online persona,
which coordinates might have been shaped by a little more than 14 years or so of addictive behaviors and as many data points with pointed directions (some fascinating paper picked at random, about euclidian distance, which I have incidentally used in the past to see if there would be some consistency when considering proximity with other like-minded peers, also with another implementation in PHP).
As a reminder, tweets curation applied to French media refers here to providing with a concise summary revealing what surfaces everyday in the news by assuming that popularity could be derived a little from manual retweets.
And in parallel, I also experimented with other Twitter lists oriented towards people and organization accounts occasionally involved in technical topics and conversations (like some specific although mainstream programming languages, or product development methodologies like lean IT).
e.g. that one dedicated to PHP at the time of curation or,
that other one initially oriented towards JavaScript…
and now who could really tell 🤷🏼
Those topics turned out to be progressively tainted with so many layers of controversial sub-topics after a while that i could not really acknowledge anymore that I had maintained the originally intended common ground, label or topics between items of the same list, without betraying part of the underlying subscriptions set.
Among those sub-topics, most were to be dealt with more or less gracefully in the context of professional environments when being confronted to use cases like how to make such or such compromises without impeding irreversibly one of the below concerns :
How to deliver services with both device portability (mobile / desktop),
ease of progressive evolution making and accessibility in mind
(In all those years, I’m forced to confess that I don’t know much yet
about this last topic, which remains critical for developing administrative services in particular)?
e.g. In the context of inspirational magazines or e-commerce shops
when public and automated indexation by search engine robots might be given the thumbs up with highest priority than doing the work of producing syntax and semantics accessible to people affected by visual impairment
or even more likely by internet hiccups due to the lack of broadband connectivity accessHow to abide by sought application performance
when pages are to be rigged with third-party payloads 🍪
as those actually do bring money stacks to the table?And don't get me started on data security,
coming along with visitors' privacy and right to be forgotten
in full GDPR compliance
We, humans, surely seem to love good ol' dumpster fires 🗑️🔥,
or echo chambers 🔊📦 don't we?
And yet, I still believe that those same fires are not usually started
without valuable-enough reasons,
without worthwhile lessons to write down, learn and share, and
mental paths deserving the effort of considering ensemble walks.
To wrap this post, you're welcome to ping me whenever and,
by all means if and only if you'd like to participate in remote and hopefully enriching experiments yet to be defined and scheduled 🧑🔬
while you'd also be
aiming at building or connecting with communities of practice
related to software development and craft·wo·manship ✍️,looking for regular socio-technical insights and human updates 📃,
and above all futuristic cute animal worshipping halts
(like cats and kittens🐈🤭).
And last but not least, I’d like to take this opportunity to mention that
I’ll soon have some availability either
as a (preferably) remote and part-time,
Freelance Software Developer oras a technical coach or
as a mix of both or
something else to be defined
I’ve been officially certified since June 2022 in Team Management
(along behavioral, and relational axis with a strong motivational component oriented towards MEANING and a search for some).
after attending training workshops offered by SOLUT-IS,
thanks to Nathalie Leclef, whose comics helped me to better understand
personality types by using enneagrams (of personality),
as recognizing stressing factors and some of their motivational counterparts was very much appreciated along with the other topics covered
(from hints at better conflict resolution to honest optimisation in work delegation). Nathalie specialized in soft skills teaching and development after working for quite some time in IT and software consultancy companyI’ve worked so far in teams counting
from 2 individuals
e.g. collaboration between former boss and I,
when working for Herport Group in textile logistics
with interlocutors in both Hong-Kong and Dubai,
while working from Paris,
and up to 6 players
e.g. collaboration at Evaneos,
where I used to participate in remote binomial programming sessions
by sharing screens with tools like Miro,
and Discord combined with OBS or CodeWithMe
even though individual and their interactions,
should come before their tools and processes of choice 😅All while, I intend to get involved on a 3-years thesis about a topic,
which I cannot fully disclose yet and in partnership with the University of Reunion Island 🇷🇪
This was the fourth and last post in a series of four articles
about how I came to appreciate software technology watch
as part of a tailored-made self-education process,
deemed bearable with regard to mental health
in the context of my line of work since 2009.
Today in 2022, I’m a freelance software developer engineer
in the process of signing-up with the University of Reunion Island
so that I could enjoy learning more about computer science again.
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