Every week brings new challenges, breakthroughs, and a few unexpected detours. Here, I capture my thoughts, progress, and the lessons learned along the way — a behind-the-scenes look at the ongoing adventure of coding, life, and just trying to make sense of it all.
I’ve been working on fixing some of the hindrances on PHPSandbox that don’t allow us to be able to build some functionalities for Laravel. One that stands out is the support Vite based Laravel apps which require long-open connections like WebSocket in the Expose tunnelling server.
This new week didn’t come without its own bite. I started it feeling overwhelmed by everything that is meant to happen this week alone - I need to attend my German class on Monday, and keep up with the research concerning the new project/team at work so I won’t be behind when the actual work starts.
It's a new week and we are still on edge about the election that happened during the weekend. Results are yet to be finalized and we are all looking forward to what it would finally be.
After settling down a bit from all the stress of moving to the new apartment, I decided to give WebContainers a spin again and see if there are any things I could still do to find my way around the issues I was having.
My mom turned 60 this week and we organized a surprise birthday celebration for her. Initially, she didn't want to mark this in any spectacular way when she told me about it.
After a long break from working on Composer UI, I finally resumed it. This idea has lingered in my head for a long and I feel bad for myself for not working to get it out.
I finally made the Visa appointment where I get to submit the documents and do Biometrics capture. Given that I’ve only had to go for two Visa appointments before now and both with a few bad experiences, I didn’t expect this one differently.
I thought I’m done with this whole visa thing and having to start again comes with a lot of bad vibes.
I didn’t see the internet issue having much impact on me but I guess I’m wrong given I haven’t had to be in such situations in a long time. Aside from my movie plans for weekends, I thought the problem would be solved as early as possible on Monday.
After four months in Berlin, we finally started apartment search - a renown nightmare when you speak of housing in Berlin. Even before we moved here, we have never stopped hearing about the nightmares of finding an apartment to stay and for this reason, we started looking for an apartment a month to our departure date from Nigeria.
Ended the year with a long call with four of my friends. We have been having this call, where we get to relive our times in the University while still catching up with the new things in our lives. We usually have this meeting every month where we get to talk and this has been going on for the last 2 years outside our university.
Some parts of my last notes highlighted the fact that I’ve been working on reducing the storage costs on PHPSandbox. I also highlighted how cheaper it is to have data stored in AWS S3 compared to having them stored inside EBS instances which is basically what we’ve been doing all this time.
I had another session in my Engineering Mentorship program where I get to pair with someone who has more experience in an area the mentorship is based on. For me, it is Kubernetes, and the idea is to achieve some specific goals.
Mercy and I decided to take some time to visit my extended family in Ilora while we were in Lagos. We made our travel down to Ibadan and then Ilora. My parents and sibling were happy to receive us even with the short notice to them before our journey there.
Back at work, I started an Engineering Mentorship program to get to learn Kubernetes even more. A program where you will be paired with a mentor in a specific field where your goal lies. I don't use Kubernetes at work or depend on it for my daily routines but I see it as something I should learn moving forward due to some things I’ve been trying to achieve.
I continued working on the *not-so-secret project*. This time I had to ensure some markdown code from GitHub matches the dark and light theme when they are rendered. Making some modifications to the default Laravel markdown renderer sure helped with styling the code blocks.
I started the week with an opportunity to work with people from other teams during an internal hackathon event. It was also an opportunity for me to explore other areas of tech within Shopify. I have some set goals around my work at Shopify and participating in the 3 days hackathon helped me to progress toward those goals a bit. I was able to do some research in some areas I know very little about.
Started the week off on another holidays so we (Mercy and I) decided to get out of the house this time and go finally try out IBOM ICON Hotel & Golf Resort and logged in one of the rooms. We’ve both been in Uyo for some years (for Mercy even much longer than myself) we've always wondered what lodging there would be like.
There are a couple of reasons why this migration back to Inertia JS is beneficial for PHPSandbox, the major reason being that every request now hits the Laravel backend first and that gives access to do a lot before returning a response.
Started the week off with a holiday on Monday which came in pretty handy. I thought I would spend the majority of the day resting until I decided to go fix something in the car. This gradually turned into one of the numerous problems a car could develop.
I've been onto my university for almost a month trying to get my degree certificate and all the effort hasn't been fruitful. Initially, it was for the fact that the certificate isn't ready (that the VC hasn't signed them off) even after 2 years of graduating.
After over 3 weeks in Kigali, we finally came back to Uyo. We were both convinced that we would miss being in Kigali mostly the fact that we had very little stress while we were there. Being in Kigali has personally helped me deal with much of the accumulated stress I had before travelling there.
Started the week off resting, still bent on not touching code at all so I got to watch Superman and Lois - I've waited all this while to watch the second season. It seems quite interesting as it is going. Mercy and I also got to watch some Anime most nights.
I decided to take a week off work to finally get some time to relax time during which Mercy and I finally get to explore Kigali. We hired a car and went out from morning till night going around different parts of the city.
I learned, while on a call with Denis, that it is possible to control my personal laptop from my work laptop using the built-in Screen Sharing app on Mac. It was nice to finally find a simple way to get into my personal laptop while at work.