Quinn Chrest

Roll herd 🦬🦬🦬 🟢🟡🟢🟡 NDSU vs UND

When I was in highschool playing video games with my friends, Brandon and I were Ferrari guys and Casey and Nolan were Lamborghini boys. We would play Forza Motorsports and do Ferrari vs Lamborghini races 2v2. We probably spent way to much time on the tracks but it was a good time. Seeing my favorite Ferrari, the 458 Italia, brought back those memories! Photo taken by myself at the Chanhassen car show this morning.

I have not had time to write, and I have some big news to share so how about we Walk and Talk? This is the segment where I talk to my phone like a crazy person while walking in public.

I got a new job! I am now a Software Engineer II at IWCO in Chanhassen, MN, where I will be working on internal systems. I’m in my second week and excited to be working with them. A lot of training so far and getting to know my new team. I’ve met a lot of impressive people and I’m looking forward to growing with the company. I enjoyed my time with my previous employer Sights on Service, it was just time for me to take a step forward in my career. I wish the company and all my friends there the best of luck in future endeavors.

I moved out! I am now living on my own for the first time in my life. With the new job I wanted to be closer to the office and I found a great apartment in Eden Prairie. I love the location! There’s a ton of great stuff near me as well as this walking path that I’m on right now. One thing I wasn’t expecting is adulting gets expensive quick when you are on your own. Did some furniture shopping last weekend with Heidi and Frank and thank god they do 0% interest financing. Also, all the little kitchen things you don’t think of, like when I went to cook for the first time with my new pans I realized I didn’t have any cooking oil or spices.

So, in the last two weeks, I’ve started a new job and moved out on my own. I would be lying if I said it wasn’t scary. A lot of emotional eating. But even though I’ve pushed myself out of my comfort zone, I think that everything is moving in the right direction and I see a bright future ahead of me. I will fail and that is okay. It will just make the successes that much better.

I’d like to give some shout-outs and thank yous to those who have helped me the most in the last couple of years. Thank you to Jamie Thingelstad for helping me with my career development and getting me in tip-top shape for interviews. Thank you to Rosalin Chrest and Kurt Rees for letting me stay with them and establish myself in the twin cities. Thank you to Ryan Vagle for being an amazing co-worker and mentor at my previous position. Thank you to my friends and family for all the support over the years. You all rock! And last but not least, thank you to myself for the work that you’ve put in to get to where you are now. You’re still not finished but you can handle what is to come.

Alright, to cap it off I want to leave you with one of my favorite quotes from a cartoon dog:

Sucking at something is the first step to being sorta good at something. -Jake the Dog

ROLL HERD 🦬 🟡🟢

Had an awesome time this last Sunday with friends and family at the Foo Fighters concert. Dave Grohl’s vocals are insane live! Thanks @jthingelstad for bringing me with!

This year some people I follow did one of the coolest things I’ve seen. They started a coffee company were you can order from the TERMINAL! You can simply ssh into their domain terminal.shop. I would encourage you to enter ssh terminal.shop into your terminal of choice to check it out. A fully rendered ui in something as simple as the terminal. A ‘tui’ of sorts (that is to say a terminal ui). This piqued my interest in making my own terminal application. I decided on a to-do list application that I could use at work because I’m constantly writing down items and gets really annoying when you misplace your notepad or sticky note.

Since I have been working with javascript for so long I thought node.js wouldn’t be a bad place to start. The first step was to find a node package that facilitated building a ui in the terminal window. blessed was the package that went with mostly due to easy-to-understand documentation in their GitHub repo. I was able to fairly quickly make a prototype of the application that gave a view of all your tasks along with the ability to create, remove, and mark tasks complete. I even added a fancy ASCII art title screen and configured the script so that when installed globally you just have to enter todo from any directory in your terminal to access your list.

I was excited to show off the first build of my project, but there was still one thing that bothered me. You have to have node installed on the machine to be able to run the application….

A couple months have passed since the creation of the first application and I am listening to the podcast How About Tomorrow? with hosts Adam and Dax, both cofounders of terminal.shop. Partway through they started to mention their continued work on terminal.shop and they brought up the technologies they used to create it. Go was mentioned along with the bubble tea library. I put my helmet on and started spelunking the web for more info. I have previously known of Go (aka Golang) as a memory-safe lower-level language that I haven’t gotten the chance to work with. Since my interest in building tui applications still was simmering what better way to learn a new language than by rewriting one of your existing applications.

I ran through a large majority of Go’s learning material. Also had to get used to Go’s package management system, but so far enjoying the language. Bubble tea allows me to build individual views that run on an update render loop. Accompanied by bubbles for adding more ui components and lipgloss for styling that draws a lot of inspiration from traditional css styling. Building onto the ideas of the previous application I added the ability to edit tasks, built out pagination, added SQLite support instead of using json, displayed the date and time of task completion, and created a more interesting and visually appealing design. Writing an application in Go also lets me create builds of my project to wrap this all up together in an executable application.

With that, I present ToGo, a go-based task-tracking application:

Try out the application for yourself! I uploaded release 1.0.0 to GitHub so download the application and start tracking your tasks now!

Glad to finally be done with this project. Hoping to try some new stuff with Go in the future but moving on to game dev for a bit. A couple friends and are working on a game in the Godot engine using Godot script. Maybe you will see some updates on that here in the future!

Spent the weekend up in North Dakota, helping prep my parents for their move to the other side of the state. A lot of lasts in the house that I grew up in and it doesn’t really hit until you’re there. Hoping for a smooth transition and I’ll see them next weekend to get moved into their new home. We aren’t getting any younger I guess.

Had an awesome weekend out in Bayfield, WI. Eleven of us spent the weekend kayaking, hiking, and enjoying each other’s company for Austin’s Bachelor Party! It was great to reconnect with everyone and escape the cities. The pictures below were taken at Copper Falls State Park.

First time at Art-A-Whirl! Had a great time looking at art with friends. This wire fish sculpture with pcbs was one of my favorites.

Second time at Fox Den in Burnsville! They have a great venue with friendly locals. They are one of the first stores to host events for Grand Archive, a new TCG that I’ve been playing recently. Went 2-1 with Rai in a three round swiss tournament.

This OpenAI Spring Update with gpt-4o is looking really impressive. Excited to try out all the new features! Especially the desktop app.

www.youtube.com/live/DQac…

I have been following ThePrimeagen for a bit now watching his software development-oriented content. He recently partnered up with some friends and together they are selling Nil blend coffee. The super interesting part about this release is that you can order the coffee from the command prompt by SSHing into terminal.shop. They have already sold out of the product but I just think it’s super cool.

Give it a try using:

ssh terminal.shop

I finally deactivated my account and uninstalled Tik Tok. I needed to get out of that time sucking void and try to spend my time more productively.

Speaking of more winter sports, I got my dad to come down over easter and treated him to a Wild game vs the Vegas Golden Knights! Heidi and Lance joined us and we had a great time with a great view of the rink. It unfortunately did not end in a Wild win but it was a great game all the way through. Vegas is a tough team so the fact that we held them off till overtime was good to see. The final score was 2-1 with Vegas putting the nail in the coffin after scoring a cross-rink goal after the Wild pulled their goalie with 1:30 left on the clock.

Thank you to @jthingelstad for inviting me along for my first Minnesota United game at Allianz Stadium! Had a great time watching my first professional soccer game (sort of, it was a friendlies match) against St Patrick’s of Ireland. The athleticism of professional soccer players is truly amazing! GO LOONS!

You can find Jamie’s post about the game here which includes some cool pics.

Made it out to Red Lodge, MT with friends from my hometown area to try snowboarding for the first time! I have to say snowboarding is probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to learn. It was a humbling experience after talking up a big game the week prior but man I didn’t know what was in store for me. Even though my body was sore from head to toe I had a ton of fun and plan on going again. I’ve caught somewhat of a winter sports bug after getting into hockey, trying ice skating, and now this. May need to invest in some gear and hit up Afton Alps here in Minnesota next season.

Having a good time out at Red Lodge! Second day and I’m extremely sore but determined to get this snowboarding down.

Had an awesome day out with some great company yesterday! Met up with the Thingelstad’s and went for a nice walk around Lake Harriet. Super weird going for that long of a walk this time of year with just a shirt and jeans but with the temps in the 60’s you gotta take advantage of it! @tthing asked me about memes and that sparked a discussion about the origin of the word meme from Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene. @jthingelstad did a much better job explaining the core ideology of the book than I can regurgitate back to you guys now but the topics covered definitely scratched an itch of the deep thinker inside of me so I think I better check it out. Thought I almost hurt myself after running with Tyler and Mazie. They said they were going to run ahead but I didn’t know running ahead was going to mean a full-blown sprint. My calves were not ready for that 0 to 100 😂. I would say must be nice to be young still but I don’t think I’m old enough to be allowed to say that.

After a bit, we sat down in the living room where I pet dinosaurs, watched pod racing while sitting on Tatooine, played mini golf on the coffee table, and studied the Mars rover. I understand this is a pretty farfetched but this all happened while wearing the Apple Vision Pro! Jamie ran me through various demos and I gotta say this is one of the coolest pieces of tech I’ve ever had the opportunity to use. Looking forward to how this will revolutionize the wearable tech world. Excited to see Apple build on this and improve it as well as competitors getting involved.

Joined the Thingelstad’s for a delicious dinner at Pajarito’s in Edina. We enjoyed tacos, queso fundido, brussel sprouts, and of course, don’t forget the chips and salsa. The brussel sprouts were super good! After dinner, they were off to see Dune Part Two. Jamie spoke of his love for the series over dinner so he was really looking forward to it. Go check out his blog post at thingelstad.com on his thoughts after seeing it!

Met up with some friends from college afterward to celebrate Chells birthday! We went bowling at Memory Lanes near downtown. Had a ton of fun catching up over a couple beers and throwing a bowling ball. It had been a while since the last time I went bowling so it took a while to de rust but it was a good time had by all.

Last weekend I got out with my Aunt Heidi to the 2024 Winter Beer Dabbler! It’s a giant event held at the Minnesota Fair Grounds were a ton a brewery’s showed up to give out samples of their best beers. Had a blast trying some new stuff and my favorite by far was Drekkar’s blueberry cobbler beer that was very thick and tasty! They also had stunt guys doing jumps on ATV’s, Snowmobiles, and Motocross Bikes. Managed to capture some cool mid air action pics!

Killing two birds with one stone this evening. I’ve wanted to look into other frameworks that can easily implement web API’s and learn Python. Django! That is the answer! So far I’ve worked through the first two tutorials and I have to say I’m really enjoying it. I feel like the last two years of experience I have accrued working with Restful API’s makes Django feel really easy to pick up. Don’t really know what my end goal is but a lot of roadblocks to ideas I’ve had is not knowing what to use to set up a back end of sorts to handle requests and interact with a database. Oh and did I mention that it is already preconfigured to use SQLite! So no need to worry about the database aspect either. Going to keep working through the tutorials and see if I can think of some ideas for apps to utilize this project. Would probably be a good thing for me to work through handling user logins and dealing with auth tokens.