Week 20
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. This part of the work definitely reminded me that I'm not so good at writing CSS nor have the patience to even make sure I style things in a way I would like. At the same time, it was fun getting many parts of the styling to work even though it took longer.
I mentioned some improvements in the interactive notebooks from last week and I managed to get them working as intended. Even with things working as expected, I can't stop having this fleeting thought that maybe something would go wrong when in production. But we'll see when it finally hit the runway! For now, I’ll just keep testing it.
While on the Benin trip, I had the opportunity to be on the beach again. I couldn't resist the urge to jump in the raging water - I thought I had grown up a bit 😂. At some point, a friend and I got caught in one of the larger waves and I could remember myself, in a split second, thinking that this wave will probably wash me off my feet into the Atlantic ocean. I felt scared and at the same time enjoyed it - maybe I missed playing dangerous games 😂.
We also went for a wind sail. I didn’t know that could be fun too. I’ve only been on boats with mechanical propellers and have a more safe feeling when on them. In this case, we’re at the mercy of the wind carrying the sail. I don’t seem to want to trust that. One important question on my mind was, what if the wind stops 😩 and we’re just there in the middle of the water. I guess a part of me was scared anyway. The whole fear seems to get dismissed as we got on the waters.
Together with the rest of the colleagues I visited Benin with, we played the Escape game - A game where we as a team need to solve a puzzle so that you and your team can escape the room. The rule of the game requires that we solve the puzzle in under one hour. If we exceed this time, the game is over but as a punishment, we will need to remain in the dark, haunted room for another one hour until we're let out of the place. The worst part of the game for us was the fact that all the clues were written in French (the lingua franca of the Benin Republic). Even though we had someone in the room help us with some translation, it was still a bit difficult. It felt a lot like trying to look for clues to pieces of a puzzle in a video game and I enjoyed every bit of it. I wished something like that is in Uyo anyways.
After we left the Escape room, I tried to think about how the business model could be and how the game could encourage people to come back since it's the same room and the same puzzle. It seems rotating the puzzle for the game might be difficult due to the fact that the rooms had to be prepared for it and repurposing the room could take a while and be expensive. But I know little about this business and can't really say much about how profitable it could be for its owner.
Meanwhile, we had to make our way back to Nigeria from the Benin Republic and little did we know that border officers will find their way to extort us again. It is interesting to see that it all boils down to choices when it comes to how these border officers will treat travellers even as complicated as the state of Nigeria might be. On the same trip, I see some of these officers still choosing to do the right thing - We met an NDLEA (a Drug Law Enforcement body in Nigeria) officer that inspected our Bus and gave us a detailed overview of what we can do to ensure our subsequent cross-border road travels have proper clearance. We even got to ask him questions and felt safe while having the conversation with him. He did all that without even demanding money as most of the officers we met at the border would do.