2021.08
It’s another monthly update since July. I think having these monthly status updates are working out quite well. It gives me a thorough retrospect of the month and I think it helps me keep track of my progress on projects.
August wasn’t really the best month compared to the recent ones. It was a busy month at the workplace with The Board of Audit and Inspection carrying out the annual inspection. There were also some troubles at the workplace, but I think the worst part is over and is things are getting wrapped up. Since I am not sure if I am allowed to speak of it in unrelated environments (such as this website) I won’t talk about it anymore. However, it certainly was a new kind of challenge for me, and it did quite hinder my progress with the projects that I was working on too.
Although the progress on the projects were subtle, it wasn’t halted. I am still working on the SXC - Simple XMPP Chat. Earlier this month, I was stuck on what to do next as I didn’t have a clear picture of how the application will interact with various internal components. A great solution was to draw out a horrible mix of a state diagram and a sequence diagram.
It’s not the prettiest diagram nor the clearest, but it surely did serve its purpose of providing me with a vague blueprint of how the application was going to work. From there on, based on the diagram, I added tasks to the project board and implemented the necessary internals. Seems like I did a lot, but the results seems to disagree. Since the minimalistic UI and the TLS networking to an XMPP server seems to be working as expected, I think I am finally ready to implement the blocked queues for in/outbound messages and actually get in some actions with the XMPP protocols.
In a side note, I found the TLS stuff to be quite interesting while working on this project. So, I plan to actually go deep into the rabbit hole of how SSL/TLS actually works to get a better grasp of it. Currently, I feel like I am just calling methods from a library like a robot. Instead, I want to know how cert verification actually works, what X.509 certs are, the various cipher suites, hostname verifications, and tons more. Even if it might take time, I feel like this might be one of the best moments in my life where I can actually take some time to learn new things as I am not in school or work.
The Gundam Universal Century guide that I am working on is also on the verge of first release. The React components are almost finished, and I am now filling in the information for each series/movie. I hope to make a release soon and perhaps update the README from the template.
In conclusion, although I said the month was slow and grumpy, I think I made a lot of progress.