Am I still here?

No posts since Codegarden, What's that about? 

Being an adult is hard. Finding a balance between work, responsibilities, studies, obligations and hobbies is even harder. I left Codegarden inspired, but life got in the way. I have managed to do a few things but not as much as I liked!

A lot of my spare time now is occupied with my Counselling studies. I have recently got my fitness to practice which means I can see real clients as a student. 

I'm not going through that alone though, my husband is doing the same course with a different provider and agency which adds to the busy calendar. 

Amongst the chaos, a mini break was needed so I booked a last minute long weekend away to Cumbria. It was a quaint glamping pod with just the essentials right on the "doorstep" of the Hadrian's Wall path. 

The break consisted of reading, walking, day trips to the Lake District, a few games on the Nintendo switch and a few bottles of wine while soaking in the hot tub. It's times like this where I remember how important a break or holiday is whether it's a 2 week holiday abroad or a long weekend staycation. 

When people talk about using AI these days, they usually mean generating code, drafting emails, or creating trippy images. My use case in the hot tub? Running a solo tabletop RPG session.

I found myself sitting in the bubbles running a solo game of Risus: The Anything RPG, using AI as an interactive game master and sounding board. I ended up spinning up a whole custom universe and storyline on the fly, rolling dice between sips of wine and just letting my imagination run wild without any pressure. It turned out to be one of the most creatively refreshing parts of the whole trip.

This led to the idea of publishing the adventure here on my site, kind of like a daily, weekly blog of how the adventure goes. I'll keep it separate and dump it under the "Weird Stuff" section so those that aren't interested aren't drawn in :) 

I took the hard but obvious decision to stop all freelance work in favour of increasing my AI knowledge and skills, focusing on my studies and being more active in the Umbraco community. 

Since then I have:

• Joined the Umbraco East Midlands group and attended my very first Meetup.

• I volunteered and delivered my first public talk ever, with the topic being Umbraco Automate

• I published my very first GitHub repository, NuGet package and listed on the Umbraco Marketplace. Checkout Umbuntu.Automate.ManualTriggerInput for a new Umbraco Automate trigger which allows you to pass data at the point of running it.

• I have a talk lined up with my Colleague Paul at the NN1 Dev Club in November. The topic is on the X / Y problem. The talk is platform agnostic but a little demo of Umbraco may feature in the talk :) Tickets are free so if you are in the Northampton are do sign up today: https://nn1.dev/

• I have a few ideas to contribute to the Umbraco Automate repository that I am hoping to create PR's for.

• Lastly, I am hoping to start my very own monthly podcast. I'm looking to do something a bit different and unique so stay tuned. It will have a focus on software development, Umbraco, AI and a little bit of personal life thrown in. I have reached out to a few people who have graciously accepted being a guest when its up and running. If you would like to be a guest or even potentially a Co-Host please do reach out to me on LinkedIn or Discord.