Day 6: Sweatshop

Today really flew by. My mornings always seem over in the blink of an eye because I have my apprenticeship daily and the morning Kata. But today, I had two meetings after the Kata. The first meeting was with Markus to discuss the RSS feed for his blog and try to fix it (to no avail). The second meeting was also with Markus to discuss our plans for the friday talks. We discussed potential schedules, topics, and logistics. We ended up settling on a topic (which will remain a secret for now), so I consider this meeting a success ☺️.

After this, I started creating a blog post for an RSS feed “how to” for those who create a blog with Hugo. Masha suggested doing this because it seems like other apprentices had trouble adding this feature to their Hugo blogs (unless, of course, if the feature was already implemented in their theme). Unfortunately, adding html text to a markdown file caused me a lot of trouble, so I was not able to finish it before my first workshop.

My first workshop, hosted by Jens, was about remote collaboration. It was very interesting to hear the insights of people in charge of facilitating remote meetings because I never thought about their perspective. I learned that, as a remote meeting facilitator, it can be very hard to gauge how well the team members are communicating with each other. With remote communication, a lot of the face-to-face interactions are lost (e.g. body language, small talk, immediate response, etc.). The absense of these minor yet important interactions makes it much more difficulat to communicate and create a good team vibe.

Unfortunately, I did not get a chance to work on any haskell today. So tomorrow, I will complete my RSS how-to post and work on Haskell.

But man, my brain is fried. The workshop was 3.5 hours long and in a room that had no AC. It was a great workshop and I learned a lot, but I went through 3 full bottles of water as a result of the heat (hense the title of this post). Time to go walk home in the heat… to an apartment similarly with no AC. Please keep me in your prayers (I’m just being dramatic for fun. I think I’ll survive. But I’d still appreciate some prayers😅).