Bug Whack

At the end of July I attended a Bug Whackathon at a Bellevue Startup incubator called Venture Mechanics.  The event was co-hosted by them and the group Innovate QA to help assist local startups with testing their platforms and giving community members a chance to show off and hone their skills.

I had a great time meeting so many other engineers from different walks of life and seeing some new platforms.  This was the first of planned events to help bridge this need and I look forward to the future events to see what changes it brings.  

Seeing so many other QA Engineers and hearing their thought processes was a big help for me.  I was able to find some issues with each platform I tested, but no major bugs.  Black Box style testing was the main order of the day, though their were a few engineers their running their own software testing agents through LLMs.  

New Portfolio Projects

 I've started to very seriously start my portfolio rather than leave some half baked scripts and ideas around as my public github profile.  I found a PDF called 140+ Basic Python Programs.  I am going to go through the book helping to refine the knowledge I've gotten in my CompSci classes and will be elaborating on them to show off those skills.  I've also been attending public coding meetups and doing more networking, but more on that next time. 

Backlog

 Well I have been off for a month, unintentionally.  I made the move to iOS recently and since there is no google supported app for blogger on the platform I stopped checking my scheduled posts as much.  As it is, no big deal, I've been busy networking and working on my own portfolio to find a job in this current economy.  

My PDS is still online and I am starting to build custom feeds to host with the intent to move my account off of bluesky PDS and onto my own self-contained set.  There is a Python SDK for ATProto that I have been meaning to being to learn and will hopefully help me get this all setup.  

PDS Online

I've been keeping an eye on my PDS for the last two weeks and its working well.  I haven't done much else yet, but I want to work on a tool to copy DID from lists to make mass transfers of blocklists and feed transfers much easier.  I would like to setup an automated posting but don't yet have a good subject that won't just be post spam in the firehouse. 

I've also been working on my Flask app tracking the Stardew Valley mods my friends and I have been using.  I'm mostly learning my way around the Jinja templates and figuring out how to properly use the request library.  Once I have it setup, it will also be easy to setup the automatic downloads for updated mods which should be a nice Quality of Life upgrade for us. 

Adventures in the ATproto

I started up my own Bluesky PDS last week.  I used digital ocean and the premade image to make life easier for myself and give myself a digital playground rather than get bogged down in local networking.  Eventually I would like to host my own PDS fully from home, but I have a lot to learn before we get there.  

Setting up the PDS was very straightforward as they have good documentation online as well as active discord channels.  I did have to reset the password on the test account I created as I didn't copy it down correctly but it worked well fast and the account is online now.  The PDS is at codeslice.quest 

The name is just a fun domain I grabbed for this project, I always liked the term code slicer from Star Wars and quest domains are priced as a reasonable buy right now.  

I did sign up for a free Resend account to add email auth but something is still misconfigured there as it still has not verified my email.  I'll be debugging that this coming week.

Looking forward to starting to automate posts and other operations through scripts, maybe even create my own lightweight posting app.