Something I’ve seen done but never quite had a particular use for, is sharing an end-of-week summary of sorts. In light of yesterday’s post, putting something a bit lighter out might better help set the mood of what’s coming from my writing.
Journaling some of the things I’m learning, especially things that help me do my things would be helpful for me. I also wouldn’t mind sharing a bit of some other interests I have (like music); maybe there’s something that connects a dot for y’all.
Learning Engineering
I’m growing as a manager of a tech team, and I’m trying to focus some growth to have a better understanding of the complexity of the work on learning how they work, and what stakeholders need from them so we all work together more smoothly to tackle some of my ambitious goals ahead.
I’ve been teaching myself about containerization. I am trying to expedite things for the team, and now trying to expedite things for the larger team by taking on some backlog in keeping our architectural reviews and documentation up to date. I got Docker up and running, and DATASIM generating. I have a few different things I want to do that this is useful for, so I’m excited I got that up and running.
This has me learning about how to make C4 Diagrams for Context, Containers, Components and Code. Elsevier has a pretty mature organization for architecture and it’s an area I’m kinda glad to have an opportunity to be schooled on it.
I’m certain there’s value in learning organizations communicating better with the business and every opportunity to work directly with stakeholders in the business intelligence supply chain is a solid one to learn about the tools, customs, processes and most importantly what their priorities are.
VR
I’m doing some consulting for a group that involves an educational multi-player activity in virtual reality, so I’ve been playing with the kids’ Quest 2 and learning how to use my hands to navigate instead of the controllers. That’s been a bit disorienting as an orientation.
The Oculus API documentation exists, and one of the outputs of my work is likely going to be an xAPI Profile for the application, which so far will use many, if not all cmi5 concepts because sessions, launches, initialization and termination are all still needed to be identified in the data stream for analysis. There’s obvious implementation dependencies on the Oculus API and probably even their SDK, which will need to be cross-referenced. That will be funsies.
Talking with Jen Murphy from Quantum Improvements, learned a bit about eye tracking and attention. For procedural things, it’s critically important. It’s not just the eye tracking, it’s head tracking. The world moves independent of your eyes for being able to pay attention to the specific thing. If there’s an order of operations, eye-tracking in VR is very helpful in evaluating the learning experience.
This was a huge learning for me, and seems to be a way to start evaluating tacit knowledge.
Music
I was asked about my favorite cover song this week, and I have a whole playlist because of course I do (with a bonus Bryan Adams classic that’s most definitely not a cover. Sometimes… playlists cut like a knife 😉
Sandwiches

This Italian-roasted pork with sharp provolone, spinach and especially this blanched long-hot was an inspiration, from Lorenzo’s Pizza in Italian Market.
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