JP @pixelpaperyarn@hackers.town

Little spring friends.

It's been a rough week and a half health-wise. Yesterday was a real nadir for my mental state. The hardest part is being kind to myself and accepting my limitations when this happens.

This morning when I got up I was feeling physically a little better, but mentally not so much. But I took a couple deep breaths, did my morning practices, and made a gentle plan. I would do a simplified version of my regular exercise routine and take a shower and in that process also spontaneously decided to get DRESSED. Like, with jeans and a better shirt. By the time I was tying my shoes I was feeling significantly better.

I still acknowledge that I'm not at 100%, that will take a few more days. However, I am feeling like I can handle my bare minimum responsibilities, and I'm happy with that.

I feel like a ping pong ball this morning. GOT MY FIRST VACCINE APPOINTMENT!!! Scheduling that was a bit wild. We have to go 50 miles away but whatever. I realized that it's the same day I make my 4th attempt to pick up my special government ID card. So basically, I'm OOO on April 2nd. lol.

I AM SCHEDULING MY FIRST VACATION IN 5 YEARS!!! As long as it gets approved (don't see why not) I'll be off 4/12-4/16 and I am EXCITED.

You know, I've been writing a lot of documentation and doing a lot of research on pair programming techniques and I gotta say:

Holy shit there is a lot of crossover between pairing and dom/sub.

At it's core, to do pairing well, there needs to be a shit ton of communication and consent. There's often a driver and a navigator, too. Don't get me started on "strong style". 🤨

I'm in the process of writing recommendations for tools to use for remote pairing and it is taking all of my willpower not to actually use the word "consent" and suggest you use a safeword when you're overwhelmed or confused during pairing.

Pro tip: When writing tests if you are using constants in your application code you should be using those constant values in your test data and factories as well.

Pro tip: When you update the optional parameter name in your code, remember to update it on the corresponding test rather than wonder for 15 minutes how you broke everything you just did.

Happiness today is removing most of the code I wrote last week and refactoring it into something much more streamlined and easier to parse.

I've been trying to work on a German accent in order to support my German language studies. Wrapping my head around the accent (I'm generally not awesome at accents) in English has been helpful in my pronunciations.

Thus far I had been trying to hear Werner Herzog in my head and it's been with limited success. His accent is German with subtle mixes of some other languages.

Last night standing in the shower, inspiration hit. I heard Dr. Ruth in my head and was immediately able to mimic the accent. I sat and did my Duolingo later and with her bright, crisp tones in my mind my pronunciation was significantly better!