Week in Review 2024-07-22
Coding adventures at work and on side projects, enjoying summer in Amsterdam, and interesting links from Mastodon, software, and YouTube.
Hello, regular readers, and welcome to the new ones!
This is Luis, with the latest issue of my newsletter. I write this newsletter to share my passion for photography, cities, and technology, along with interesting links I find over the week(s). This newsletter will be (as long as possible) free, but if you like to support it feel free to become a paid subscriber (pay what you want), or buy one of my photos.
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New week in review. As I wrote last week, I'm coming back from the writing hibernation.
On this past week, I spend much of my working time coding. I missed it. At work, we got together to have a hackathon/mini-sprint to fully focus on one project and move from 0 to prototype. It was very fun to get to start working on something new, starting from a blank canvas, and by the end of the third day, have a working prototype. Part of the fun was the speed on which we developed, iterating rapidly to get some basic functionalities in place that allowed us to tell a story with the tool. The story telling part is a key feature when developing a prototype, at the end of the day we need to be able to show the tool, and make a compiling business case of it, thus having a clear story gives guidance on what features to prioritize to have them working, and which ones can be mock-ups, or have a supporting role.
Besides coding for work, I also got to code for side projects. I'm working on a platform to showcase some geospatial data, and this week I got to do some work on it. The focus of the week was to have a deployed environment. I got to use AWS Lightsail to store a Django app in a container. I'll make sure to write more about it, but I'm happy with the result of the week, a deployed application, including GeoDjango and all the geo-dependecies, and a CI/CD pipeline in GitHub.
Overall it was a very positive coding week!
On the personal side. This week we finally had summer weather in Amsterdam! With multiple days going above 25°C it was the perfect weather to be outside. So we did. This included going to the park to spend some time under the sun, and enjoying a drink. Going to a BBQ to celebrate the birthday of two friends with more friends, great food and drinks. A great way to spend a Saturday!
Finally, one of my favorite activities in this city has been getting on a boat, and this week also had this activity. There's something special about enjoying a city from the water, just going into a boat with friends, and navigating the different canals while enjoying the company, some good drinks and laughs. It was gezellig.
This was a long week in review. I guess my hands were itching to write, as I haven't write in a long time hehe.
Here are some interesting links I found along the week, hope you enjoy reading it, and find the links interesting!
Mastodon
Software
Table Plus // I'm enjoying using it for working with Postgres databases
Weeknotes
Youtube
The Amsterdam Loft // A church re-converted into a really nice loft.
API Maybe: Bootstrapping a web application circa 2024 // Via Jochen week notes
Thanks for reading!
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About this newsletter
I'm Luis Natera, a software developer, network scientist, and data/cities/tech nerd. I have an interdisciplinary trajectory (architecture -> sociocultural studies -> network science -> software development), you can read more about me and my career here.
This is a weekly newsletter about photography, cities, and software.
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