Feb 2026 Month Notes
I had a nice February. I went on holiday and saw some lovely Argentino primos, spent a day with dear friends, and there was a birthday in our clan. How about you?
I didn’t enter the GHCP CLI hackathon
In the first half of the month, I stressed myself out trying to put an entry into the dev.to competition for using the GitHub CoPilot CLI. Why? Self-imposed pressure related to:
- Creating Kotlin portfolio work
- Making something with a chance to be high profile
- Winning free GHCP and/or money
My first mistake was that I had the deadline in my head at the end of half term, and I thought I could work on it over my holiday. It was in fact at the beginning of half term so I had to hurry to try to get something out. It wasn’t working out and was just very frustrating.
By “not working out” here I mean that the code was written, my project ran locally, but I understood too little about how it ran and the deployment story to host or operate it. Clearly I needed to upskill on the tools that make the thing go.
Not all coding is learning
I’m meant to be learning Kotlin (and JVM, and Postgres, and Gradle), not just vibing it, and as we know, taking AI to school is like taking a forklift to the gym. Yes, the weights go up and down, but you don’t get any stronger.
In the end, putting the agentically coded work to one side and building up iteratively more sophisticated spikes/glitches of Kotlin projects feels more intellectually honest and true to who I am as a developer.
By the time you read this, hello-javalin should be live at: https://hello-javalin.sign.me.uk/
Have a poke around if you like JSON.
Kotlin, JVM, Gradle
It’s called Gradle bc it takes you straight from the cradle to the grave 🙃🙃🙃
I often run the line “it’s all software dev, how different can it be, the skills are all transferable and I’m lowkey a genius, clearly” and going from .Net to JVM you’d think this would be especially true. WRONG! Didn’t mother always tell me “Pride comes before a fall!”?
Yeah, it turns out that while deductive skills and the intuition to use tools well are very transferable, there are vast seas of knowledge to cross on the way to JVM island.
I’ve decided to stop using IntelliJ so I can tell what the heck is going on under the hood when I run things, take a bit of magic away, and actually grok comprehend the tools and the outputs.
Perhaps a post is oncoming on how I learned to build and package a Kotlin server app, but it’s a lot to write down and I don’t know if I have it in me!
Teeth
Whoof, so, while I was typing this, I was sat in the waiting room of a faraway dental surgeon for an appointment that was supposed to have been an hour ago, when to my surprise lots of people who expected merely to get their teeth X-rayed today came out with fewer teeth in their head. Started to get a little nervous there and had to stop and pray for peace a while! 🤲
Well, it’s now the next day and it turns out my tooth is complicated and it will not be exiting my mouth this week. Which was a relief.
Don’t know how to sign off.
Boycott Twitter/X! Mã đáo thành công! Bye!