Morning Pages: October 28th, 2020

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, I've been locking myself down until I think it's safe to go out again. To alleviate fear and stress, my writer's group has put together a daily "morning pages" get-together on Zoom in order to touch base before starting the day. Here's some of my brief thoughts.

Kitties on a tile floor!

Floor floofs. I like the way that sounds.

The presentation worked out rather smoothly! I thought it was going to blow up in my face, but I managed to get enough content out the door where I didn't embarrass myself. I do think I should have worried that I wasn't going to make it, because I created the slides literally the hour before I gave the presentation, but I didn't have to give a presentation for 1.5 hours (it was intros + announcements + my presentation + Q&A + happy hour and my presentation aspect took maybe 30-45m).

I think this is the first tech talk that I've given to a third-party group. Maybe if I continue to give tech talks, I'll become better at speaking. I do think without having this talk, I won't have the experience of using property-based testing necessary for advocating for it authoritatively. Maybe I should give a presentation on an app, and then create the app after feeling like I can't back out of it.

I probably need to wrap up my learnings into a blog post. I have one partially written already, but I didn't finish the coding samples and maybe having a second party review it would be nice.

Fun fact: I had no idea how to paste code blocks in a good-looking manner into Google Slides, and I thought I'd need to use something like Spectacle, which would be an HTML/React-based presentation material. Instead, because VS Code's interface is HTML (because it is an Electron app underneath the hood), I can just straight up paste the code blocks from VS Code, set the highlight color to transparent, and set the text color to black. It actually looks way better than using a third-party formatter and pasting the text there.