🇬🇧🇺🇸 Amethyst Platform - DevLog 3
What is Amethyst Platform?
Amethyst Platform strives to be a one-stop platform for the complete application lifecycle. As soon as you push some changes to your code, we test, build, configure and deploy it so that you don't have to worry about that. Everything is managed through an amethyst.yaml file in your project, and we do the rest. You can read more on the Amethyst Platform website or on the Amethyst Platform project page .
Progress in the past two weeks
Unfortunately int the past two weeks I didn't put a single minute in Amethyst Platform because of multiple factors:
Game jam
I participated in a game jam (unfortunately I didn't finish the game in time for it, the scope of the game was too big for such a short time span). I went for a simplified social simulator: you are a character with some stats such as health, happiness, intelligence, social skills, etc and a set of interests.
The game includes a few NPC characters that also have their own interests (eg. sports, space, math, music, painting, etc). The goal of the game would have been to live your life in a small neighborhood, interact with the NPCs and the environment, craft dialogues so that you discover common interests and win them as friends. Different NPCs will then offer different perks depending on the friendship levels.
The environment would also include different objects with which the player could interact, eg. "make bed", "sit on a bench". These actions would offer different bonuses if performed. As you could see, the scope of the project is huuuuuge for a single person team to accomplish in a single week of development.
Hectic work volume
Being the CTO of Vuuh , the workload I had to face these past two weeks was more than other weeks. A lot of new bugs and new features that need to be done yesterday popped up, different planing for different areas of the company that involved me needed to be done.
Overall, the increased workload lead me to not having enough energy left at the end of the day to invest in my coding side projects. In order to prevent burning out, I need to thread the needle carefully.
Getting into mentoring
To tone down on the startup aspect of my side projects, I started planning and doing some things for my next endeavor, which will not yield any money: I want to mentor some software developers that are at the start of their careers, to allow them to gain the skills and understanding of the most important concepts in software development. You can read more about this on my new Mentorship page
I haven't launched this new endeavor officially, but the moment is coming soon.
Prioritizing health over coding
For a long time, I've led a pretty sedentary life. The COVID-19 lockdown made things even worse, because I was stuck in my very small 32 square meter (~340 square feet) apartment all day long.
Now that I got the vaccine, I had to make a few changes in my life and start prioritizing my physical health a bit more. I started hitting the gym and to do that, I had to give up a few hours of my spare time that I would usually invest in my personal projects. So this limited even more my time left to spend on my personal projects.
Next steps
I have no idea what the next weeks will look like. The workload amount from my job doesn't seem to get less, but I expect it to even increase further.
So, for the next two weeks, I plan to do some baby steps to get into the flow again with Amethyt Platform:
- take care of the website a little and post a new blog post, and tweak the website a little so it is more clear what it will do
- do some small tasks and some progress on the admin platform (as I spent quite some time debugging Kubernetes resources "manually" with kubectl. I need a graphical interface to aid me, show me the resources I am interested in and group them by relevance - company, job, service, etc.)
