Week 11, 2017—Got Some Good Surfing In and Felt More Comfortable On My New Project

Last week was the 3rd week of March, 2017. I was able to have some fun surfing later in the week. I continued to progress in my transfer from 1 team to another at work. Also, my car was side-swiped while I was at Dinner in Venice. All in all, it was a fair week—considering the car side-swiping.

Changing Teams

Changing teams is tough but great for challenging new skills and learning. The product that I was working on before (a content site) still exists leading to the fair amount of continued conversation on that product. Meanwhile, I have a whole new stack, (an analytics tool) that I'm working on now. The cool part of this setup is that I get to work on a lot of things. The not as cool part [for right now], is a number of different things I'm working on is almost too much to take on all at once. It's a lot for my brain to consume and comprehend when there is context switching between old progress, new team dynamics, new tools and new skills that I need to learn. In this case, 'context switching' means changing up a thought process and workflow a lot.

As far as what I'm learning, I'm getting much more comfortable with Docker. I'm also getting a crash course in debugging. The best thing I've done so far is destroying my local dev box version needlessly a few times and disconnect my local MySQL for the content site which does not run on docker. It hasn't been the most fun but I've gained a lot from debugging, and I've been able to work with more developers—very cool.

Surfing Time

Late the week before last, I was getting out of the water and over extended my leg a bit, so I wasn't able to surf. This was good for focusing my time on learning my new workflow at work but still a bummer.

Then the weekend came, and my body was feeling pretty good. I added fins and a leash to my new fun board—a 7'2" for small wave days. The new board took some getting used to, but after a few pearls, I was able to get some fun long rides in on Saturday and Sunday.

Getting Side-swiped

I've often heard that part of being an Angeleno is dealing with what happens when your car incurs damage when parked. Well, if that is the case then I'm officially an Angeleno. I went to dinner on Sunday and came back to tripping on something while getting ready to get into my car. The thing that I tripped on was my side view mirror. Upon closer inspection of my car in the darkness (it was night), my side view mirror was off, and it had scratches on my front bumper, on both side doors, and my rear bumper. After going to the body shop, I learned it was well over a $1k in damages. The person that ran into my car left no note, so 100% of the cost was on me—or so I thought.

After going to my local body shop, they informed me that I could contact my insurance without filing a claim if I stated, 'I didn't want to file a claim' when the conversation started. So I did that and found the insurance company to be very helpful. After discussing my car issue with my insurance, I found I would only have to pay the co-pay of my damages plus my insurance would not go up!

All-in-all, I learned new things from the side-swipe situation. It is going to cost me about $600 after it's all said and done—WAY better than what I thought.

Concluding the week

This week will go down as fair because, 'darn-it'—being injured and having my car side-swiped was not fun. However, on the level of learning, it was a big week for me! 🙃

I'm still behind on writing a few posts outside of my weekly posts, so I'm going to pause this post and hopefully be catching up next week.