Learning in public, preparing for conferences, and learning about the world of global payments
Hi folks! I hope you're all doing well. The past couple of weeks have been filled with friends, family, and amazing food for me as the Thanksgiving long weekend was just last week here in Canada.
This past month, I've been trying to get through my ever-growing pile of books that I got from the library. It's one of those times where, despite my best efforts to stagger when the holds arrive, all of them came in at roughly the same time. 😅
I know this is one of the main reasons why folks like checking out books on e-readers (since the holds can be deferred if you're not ready to read the book at that specific moment) but reading a physical book is still my favourite way to read. So much so that I don't mind the occasional months of power-reading when all the holds arrive at the same time.
Things I'm musing about
Learning in public can be intimidating, but well worth it
I made the decision to switch to Vim as my IDE of choice when I started at Float Financial, and wrote about my experiences with it after a month of using it here.
The feedback that I received from the broader developer community was amazing.
I got lots of great advice and tips from folks in the comments section of the post on dev.to. I also received a lot of encouragement and support from other developers to keep on working at it because they similarly have felt that adopting Vim is worth the learning curve.
The experience as a whole reinforced for me that while "learning in public" through writing blog posts about things you're learning and what you're finding challenging can be intimidating because you're opening yourself up to feedback and comments from others, it also opens you up to receiving encouragement and help from some wonderful developers in the wider community and helping speed up your learning.
Fun things I've been up to
Preparing for GOTO Chicago and QT Conference
These are the first conferences I've spoken at since YOW! Australia at the end of 2023, and I'm really excited to get back into speaking.
The break between conferences gave me some time to explore the world of edge AI, which I wrote a bit about in my previous newsletter, and I'm excited to talk more about this area of edge computing at these conferences.
If you happen to be at one of them, please come by and say hi!
Writing new blog posts
Though most of my focus has been preparing for the upcoming conferences, I'm happy that I was able to take time to write about some recent things I've learned:
Learning about nostro and vostro accounts
Working at a fintech is giving me the opportunity to learn so much about the global financial system and, in particular, how money moves around the world.
One concept that I recently learned about is "nostro" and "vostro" accounts.
Basically, other than physical currency notes leaving a country, funds of a given currency generally stay within the country of origin of that currency (i.e.: Canadian currency stays in Canada, Japanese yen in Japan, etc.) because the national banks of those countries own them.
Nostro and vostro accounts are the mechanisms by which financial institutions (mostly banks) use to hold funds in different currencies. If you're interested in seeing a diagram showing how this works, Andressen-Horowitz has a great one here.
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