DEV Community: Ryan Burke

Senior developers should be navigators

Ryan Burke — Sun, 04 Sep 2022 11:19:07 +0000

Uncontroversial opinion I know but let me elaborate slightly on why I think seniors offer so much to the driver role in the driver/navigator pairing model (Pilot/navigator if you're fancy).

Remember being freshly hatched

We all know you can implement that loop much quicker than the junior or spring that CDK code from muscle memory without all the flickering between VS code and the docs but that isn't the point.

We all remember the feeling of being on the keyboard and truly out of our depth, praying the senior watching you would just take over but when they did, what did you learn?

Watching over someone's shoulder certainly puts you at ease in those anxiety-inducing moments but I'd argue that's one of its core drawbacks.

Many studies connect stress (not distress) in educational settings to a positive effect on memory and retention (see an example here)

Personally, I find it an extremely useful tool when trying to code in a framework/language I'm not comfortable with to dive in and have someone more practiced pick me up in situ and then explain my mistakes as I go along.

The navigator who moulded me into a pilot

I would honestly attribute my teaching style as a senior, my passion for a web-native first approach, and my confidence today as a developer to one experience with Kyle Welsby when we worked together at MAG-O (Now CAVU).

Fresh out of a job where I had NOT done well, I was a nervous fairly junior developer with a list of things that I knew I needed to learn, I'd just started at MAG-O and soon my job would be to take handover of an isometric, tenanted, custom SSR react app.

No lie I was terrified but I had a little time while Infinity Works finished up the project, they were searching for something in the UI domain when Kyle pitched a configurable native web component to integrate with Braintree and render in any framework.

Still to this day one of the coolest projects I've been heavily involved in and it is marvelous. It's live and public still here and I'm proud to see other developers have expanded on it since.

From the get-go Kyle insisted I was always on the keyboard, when I reached for an external library he prompted me to view the library on GitHub and try to reverse engineer a leaner version of the code for our specific case, gave me a load of reading about the shadow dom and even stepped me through my first experience building a CI and deploying to s3.

Months later Kyle had moved on from his contract and I was asked to build a follow-up web component to store saved card details for customers in a similar fashion, thrilled I developed this solo (Still live here) and earned a promotion to senior engineer after demoing it back to the company.

Check out Kyle's blog on his website here.

Conclusions

Without the mentorship I received early in my career, from these pairing sessions where I spent most of my time in the pilot position I would not be the engineer I am today nor I'd like to think would some of the engineers I've mentored since.

Don't take this to mean never code again once you reach senior, I'm saying take a moment to step back and think about the value gained for the whole team and engineering community from stepping back once in a while for the less experienced around you.

So if you're a CSS wizard, a cloud guru, or a back-end master and you pick up a particularly complex ticket in your domain, maybe consider reaching out to the junior on your team or an engineer without much domain experience and sit back from the controls for a little while.

You might just learn something yourself.

Why I go by "The Lotus Engineer"

Ryan Burke — Sat, 03 Sep 2022 22:03:23 +0000

My Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day(s)

After 16 months of chronic pain in my lower body, losing nearly 4 stone over a year and being completely isolated at home to avoid the embarrassment of dealing with the pain publicly I was near rock bottom, that's when the vomiting started.

Being type 1 diabetic and not even holding water down for 20 hours I had to get to the hospital quick, my lovely partner Latifah rushed me there and waited outside (covid restrictions still being quite tight) and I was hooked up to IVs and floated around the hospital a couple of days before finding a ward due to the burden on the NHS.

As you can see I was in a state and I went on vomiting for the next 8 days, multiple IVs in both arms, having my finger pin pricked to check my blood sugar every hour and getting absolutely no sleep with patients screaming all over the ward.

I was so fortunate to have my partner in every day trying to soothe me, making it bearable.

Once I was holding meals down again doctors were happy to discharge me, still not entirely sure how this had happened.

I went to go for a shower before I left terrified that nothing had even come of this.

Finding some hope

Now I am absolutely no stranger to hard times, I've dealt with homelessness as a teenager, abuse, drug addiction, insomnia and deep clinical depression in my early 20's but the place I'd been put into by the pain, sleep deprivation and isolation was the lowest I'd ever felt.

I shuffled an old playlist I'd held onto over the years with songs that'd helped me in these previous forks in the road and that's when Lotus by Cage the elephant came on.

Now I'm certainly not the first person to find motivation in music nor was this my first time finding it in this song. The lyrics of the song have long since stuck with me, I encourage a listen.

Heading back from the hospital I'd decided this was a new chapter for me, the song played in my head.

The lotus flower's
Got me thinking 'bout the way that we live
I got this feeling
It's gonna stop

I knew the life I'd been living and forcing those around me to live was no life at all, Before the pain I'd been bright and filled a room with presence and looking at myself now I barely recognised that.

The re-brand

When I arrived home I bounced into my office to see my partner with an energy she hadn't recognised in me for a long time and I felt it.

The ride home I'd been reading all about the lotus flower, in several cultures and in Buddhist traditions it's seen as a symbol of strength, resilience, and rebirth since they return to the murky water each evening and open their blooms at the day break.

I'd long been meaning to re-brand from "FirstStepsJS", it was hard to remember and originally I'd planned to document my "First steps into JS" but never did so it didn't make much sense anymore.

There were a thousand ways I could tie the Lotus back to my personal identity and brand including:

In my career I've often been responsible for taking legacy projects and overhauling them into new frameworks & languages. (Rebirth)
My ethos in programming is native first approaches and the lotus root grows deep and blooms high.
The colours & the palette I extracted from them are very feminine like me.
Lotus grow in murky conditions and bloom petal by petal reflecting the resilience I'm known for and my iterative approach to my work.

I could go on and on.

Where are we now?

Bad news first, I've been in a few more times since for same thing but we're on the way to a diagnosis and the trips are getting shorter. Fingers crossed I'm not back in again.

Overall this has a happy ending, I have a new lease on life my whole family can see, I'm a lot healthier, a haircut, a shave and back with my family.

My website and logo (thanks to a talented designer) are inspired by the lotus flower, my website is up at www.lotus-engineer.com & ryanburke.io, I have a lotus tattoo booked for my arm and I'm writing more than I ever have before.

Here's to finding the light in the darkness!

Vampiric Engineering (2/?)

Ryan Burke — Sat, 03 Sep 2022 20:10:04 +0000

The quest to build observability tools for my own body (Part 2)

Find part 1 here

Time for integrations

Now I've got my blood glucose levels reading out to my phone every 5 minutes instead of manual pinprick tests 4 or 5 times a day which gives me so much more data to work with (and it's a lot less painful!)

Now I needed to tackle the initial features list I set out:

Long-term data backups
Trend reporting
Web Dashboard
API for the glucose level readings
Hypo alerts for my partner

Now I was sure there were other diabetic developers out there working on this (because I'd met some) so there had to at least be a framework out there to help me.

Enter Nightscout

Very fortunately for me the Nightscout project had been long on a mission, to quote them.

We are compelled in the pursuit of humane and equitable application of technology to liberating people from the burden of diabetes.

Perfect! Exactly what I'd been looking for, fairly well documented, a community of developers and even better something I can give back to once I'm all settled.

Nightscout gives me some of the features I'm looking for out of the box and a fairly well configured Heroku to save me messing around with infrastructure until I'm ready (it'll be moving to AWS at some point as the Heroku free tier is being phased out this year).

Lets get it moving

Being impatient I'll be using the preconfigured Heroku deployment the project provides and the recommended cloud hosting of MongoDB to keep the data backed up so this was all fairly straight forward (and free).

Heroku doesn't provide custom domains with SSL support on the free tier so looks like that's another task for once I move it over to AWS.

But a little bit of config plus some account set ups later and I have an API I can post glucose data to, I just needed to configure my uploader.

And huzzah I have a functional dashboard, showing my entire glucose history, long term back ups of my data and an API to integrate everything else with.

Just one more thing I wanted before I put this down for a little bit.

Time to do something with that data

I wanted all this data so I can start to learn and improve my health with it, so I needed reporting tools and to my joy some lovely developer has built a plug in for Nightscout to give me just that.

Now with some config and some study (to understand what a bolus is) I had daily, weekly and monthly reports showing trends and stats that both me and my doctor can use.

In summary

The first hurdle of this was made infinitely more accessible thanks to a community of like minded developers I look forward to contributing back to with my AWS expertise.

All my initial features were now complete including an app that subscribes to the API and can alert my partner to hypos, all I needed was the provide the URL for my nightscout API and boom, my partner is much more at ease.

So in the next article, we're on to the fun stuff, getting values on my watch, my i3 status bar on linux, moving to AWS, probably some custom CSS work etc. See you then!

Vampiric Engineering

Ryan Burke — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 13:49:18 +0000

The quest to build observability tools for my own body (Part 1)

How we got here

In mid-2021 I was exactly where I wanted to be, working from home with my dog & partner, working on a client I loved when my health took a turn for the worst.

Losing 4 stone rapidly and being in and out of hospital I was finally diagnosed with adult onset type 1 diabetes.

It felt like a joke, my early life I'd fought through homelessness, abuse, and drug addiction and as soon I'd earned respect in my field and a stable life with people I love I was faced with both an uncontrollable deterioration in my health but a conscious burden I'd be managing for the rest of my life. Needless to say, my mental health was in ribbons.

Making it my kind of challenge I am no doctor and the NHS in its current state was struggling greatly (and still is) to help me, so for my and my family's sake I needed a way to put some control into my own hands.

Now if there's one thing I know and love it's data, at this moment I was testing my blood with a pinprick once every couple of hours and recording the results in a spreadsheet.

My sugars seemed to be spiking in the night and early morning but the patterns weren't clear with such a limited data set, I needed something more substantial and I knew it either existed or enough would for me to cobble it together.

Starting my investigation with how to retrieve the data more efficiently from my body I found sensors that read the interstitial glucose levels in your body via the fluid found between cells, of these sensors, there were two available in the UK.

FreeStyle Libre 2 - A Flash sensor
Dexcom G6 - A Continuous Glucose Monitor

Aside from direct software integrations and native UIs (Both of which didn't concern me because I planned to get custom with it), there were two glaring differences, Libre is a flash sensor meaning you must touch your phone to the sensor to get a reading and is much smaller and by contrast, the Dexcom is larger and takes reading every 10 minutes and feeds out to your phone.

Getting the equipment

With this information, I pressed my team of doctors to prescribe preferably the Dexcom unit to find there was a potential 12-month wait or I could receive the Libre on site, impatient as I am opted to take a sensor with me that day and make it work for me.

Now what I know, that they didn't, is while the Libre is used as a flash sensor, the sensor itself does have BLE on board for checking proximity to your phone and I was sure a developer far smarter than I would be able to help me leverage that.

Boy was I right, a company named Bubblan previously manufactured an antenna for old flash sensors and their app Diabox could be repurposed to pair to a Libre 2 sensor and without interaction take a glucose reading every 6 minutes via Bluetooth, this was a game changer.

Time to have fun with it

I now had the absolute minimum I wanted, A notification in my bar that I could check to see my current glucose level and a graph of my data so far for the day.

If you know me at all you know there's not a chance in hell this is where I'm leaving it. Time to set out some features and stretch goals to implement myself.

Initial features:

[x] Long-term data backups

[x] Trend reporting

[x] Web Dashboard

[x] API for the glucose level readings

[x] Hypo alerts for my partner

Stretch goals:

[x] Read current glucose from my watch

[x] Add current glucose to i3 status bar on Linux

[x] Create a mini display on the fridge of current glucose

[x] Add treatment info (Insulin doses)

[x] Automated email of generated reports

[ ] Overlay health data (Sleep, heart rate, blood pressure) from other sources in reports

[ ] Add carb intake information

[ ] Implement adding treatment and carb information using good voice services on my watch

[ ] Migrate onto AWS native services from Heroku

Conclusion

As you can see from the above I've set out to and accomplished a lot of features and dramatically improved the management of my health, over the next couple of chapters I'll show you what I've done and how.
So join me in part 2 and follow my cyborg vampire experience…

More of what's to come...