Set Yourself On Fire

"Set Yourself on Fire" is a song by the British/French artist Charlotte Gainsbourg. 

"Been burning all my life 

So come and set my house alight

Yeah, come and set my spirit free".

When I read the above three lines I almost burst into tears (for the 3rd time writing this post). Because:

This is exactly me. This is exactly my story.

All my life I have been moving towards this great, great, great passion. 

All my life I feel I have been moving towards something wonderful. Something that I was meant to be doing. 

And I feel like I finally found it with coding. 

I love this thing so, so much. I love this passion. I love this journey.

"Been burning all my life/so come and set my house alight/ yeah, come and set my spirit free".

Charlotte Gainsbourg is the daughter of legendary French musician Serge Gainsbourg.

His song, Bonnie and Clyde, with Brigitte Bardot, has beautiful and immense healing potential and powers as well and I have often listened to it to get through my most challenging nights.

Mark To The Rescue

I want to do a big, big, big shout-out to Mark from my team. He basically said to me in a team meeting today "You don't have to learn everything". 

I have been trying so, so, so hard to keep up with everything I am hearing at work. Much to the detriment of my stress levels and my enjoyment. Being told that I don't have to learn everything that I'm hearing has taken me off the hook - because I DO have the capacity to learn everything (I have a crazy, crazy neurodivergent brain). 

But it would be a horrible, horrible journey.

So I have decided - not to write up necessarily the notes - from chats with Mark, with Artur, with other teams - unless it seems really relevant. I'll just do what I can right? And write up what seems relevant to me - all the rest, I'll learn, I'll absorb, through processing in my head.

Learning What Is Really Important Again

I feel like I can kind of be an engineering child again. I can stop trying to learn all of the impossible stuff I have been trying to learn and focus on what is most important to me, which is 

• Actually learning to code
• Actually building (rubbish) projects
• Look up stuff on the MDN
• Starting to think like a coder, starting to problem solve
• LeetCode
• Codewars

So...

BIG NEWS! I have organised my tech to do list. And it's all thanks to Sion who helped me to organise it yesterday and Adam, Artur and Mark who all helped to make me feel like I was let off the hook for learning all the complicated things.

So now I can go back to doing what (engineering) kids do... building rubbish rock paper scissors projects in JavaScript!

And I went back to doing some basic JavaScript coding projects. And it was AMAZING.

How Far I've Come

I listened to "Bamboo" by Elder Island today and I FINALLY saw how far I'd come. This was a song I listened too all day in late Sept/Early Oct on the day I met a dev (also called Mark) with 40 years' experience and he wished me "best of luck with your new career". 

It was the day that changed my life forever.

I am struggling to write this because I almost have a tear in my eye and I'm welling up. 

But today I finally realised how far I'd come. I realised I'd come from that impossible dream with Mark (the dev - not the same one as the guy I work with) to actually structuring all of my engineering learning tasks because I am learning so much and keeping track of so much that I actually can't keep track of it just with my brain anymore (and my brain can remember LOADS!!✨).

Learning New Tech Terms

Yesterday Mark from my work and I did a refinement session with my manager. I learned SO many new words from him (also one or two from Artur) and I'd like to list some of them here.

Note: Because I was writing so much so fast I can't read all my handwriting. I have put unclear words in [square brackets]. 

(Note: Later I paused this after he 'let me off the hook', so to speak).

CDN or Content Delivery Network

"A Content Deliver Network (CDN) is a network of proxy servers that makes website content more quickly available to users". 

"This is ensured by the geographical distribution of the servers, which makes it possible to provide content from the server located closest to the end user."

If I understood correctly then Mark said "a web app knows that a CDN is there by proxy". 

He said that "a CDN serves your domain." And that it "calls into your own network". And it calls into your own network. And acts as a PROXY. And sets cache [renders] and stuff".

Mark said that CDN's can lead to (or already have?) "a high availability all over the world."

2 more phrases:

• CACHE POLICY FOR STATIC ASSETS
• JAVASCRIPT BUNDLE 

Proxy and Reverse Proxy

Reverse proxies and proxies are "all relative". Relative to a web app, and a CDN, I guess? 

Mark also said that prior to that we had/there were (I don't know) () "microservice proxy(ies)" but it was/they were "too broad" (?!?!). 

Reverse Proxy

According to Mark, "A reverse proxy is something that sits between you and another service." But then "the other service doesn't know that it's there". 

Sentry and Datadog

Sentry

Sentry does "error tracking".

It does "error management". Like it monitors (I guess) for:

• Broken lines of code
• API problems
• Something else (I think Mark said it on the call but I missed it). 

Mark said that Sentry:

• Will flag errors on the API
• And something else which I can't read but I have asked him.

Datadog 

Datadog is used to monitor and track issues; to monitor traffic; it is used for traffic. 

 According to the INTERNET then Datadog is "a monitoring and analytics tool for IT and DevOps teams that can be used to determine performance metrics as well as event monitoring for infrastructure and cloud services. The software can monitor services such as servers, databases and tools." 

Or basically it is "a SaaS-based monitoring and analytics platform for large scale applications and infrastructure".

Shift Left

Shift Left does "security alerts".

Other Key Words

EAS Build

EAS Build is (apparently) "its own build".

There was definitely more on it... But I can't remember what 😂

CircleCI

So CircleCI is... Well, its tagline is "Continuous Integration and Delivery".

According to the INTERNET, CircleCI "lets teams build fully-automated pipelines, from testing to deployment". 

Yeah right... like as if I understand anything. 

Playwright

So Playwright apparently "enables reliable end-to-end testing for modern web apps". 

Or another site explains that it's "a cross-browser framework, [that] provides end-to-end automated testing of web applications using the same API and runs frequent tests to ensure your we application is running as expected. To help test your web development effectively, Playwright sumulates a real-worl event from a user's perspective".

Um, okay, cool then... Wow.

Cache

Even though I've seen it all over my phone I don't actually know what 'cache' is. But I did pick up on the phrase: "Adopt very simple cache strategies". Whether that's something you can or should be doing, or a certain technology enables you to do, I don't know. 

BFF

Mark talked about BFF - Backend For Frontend.

He talked about "Reverse Proxy" in the context of this and said that in general this is an "architectural decision". 

He told me to google BFF pattern. 

I will do this later on in my week.

Kubernetes

Emotion

This is one I learned from Artur actually.

I am struggling to find links to it because it is a common term so I have reached out to Artur about it...

Other Phrases I Heard

• Production clusters
• Production apps
• Dynamic configs
• Multitenancy
• And that it is an "aspirational architecture choice"
• MSP
• Microservice Proxy
• Varnish 
• Fastlane
• Expo
• Astro
• YAML
• New Relic
• Monorepo

I was honestly going to write up all of these (and I'm curious... what is Varnish?) but after what Mark said I felt like I could focus on some more beginner-friendly stuff again. 

A Really Great Quote From Artur

Okay so this is a really great quote from Tuesday.

"Container Queries: It's not the size of the screen - It's the area in which you're showing your components".