Weekly update - 9 March 2016

Kyle Redelinghuys -

Strictly speaking these aren’t weekly updates anymore, but hey who’s counting.

During the last two weeks or so I’ve travelled to the UK, dived deeper into Go, and made good progress on the Visa package.

UK trip

I spent 10 days in the UK, half in London and half in Leeds. While in London I got to meet with some great people and initiatives, and got to see some friends who I haven’t seen in years. One of the people I got to chat to was Raf, a fellow software engineer, and we chatted about the banking and payments ecosystem. I got some great insight into how to move forward with the banking project.

In Leeds it was a lot more relaxed, and got to spend some quality time with my girlfriend. I’m a big fan of the UK.

Banking project

Through my chat with Raf, and looking more into how other companies in this space are doing it, I turned my attention to prepaid cards. I reached out to Visa, but unfortunately they do not offer any prepaid cards directly. Ideally, I would have loved to get more involved with them directly and keep it all in the same circle. If you work at Visa and have more insight into this, get in touch.

I reached out to a popular prepaid card company, MyChoice. They replied really quickly with detailed information on how to move forward. So basically, the costs go from $2 000 for the basic API usage and non-branded cards to upwards of $40 000 for the white-label with 1 000 cards. This is pretty affordable, so in the next few months I will try to go forward with the smaller solution and real world integration.

Go

I’ve been going through Programming in Go as well as some courses on Udemy. The idea is to get a fundamental understanding of the language, from intermediate to expert.

Visa package

I’ve done some good work on the Visa package for Go implementing most of the API calls, leaving only two left. Once I’ve done the final two, I will go through and make sure the current tests run successfully, and then flesh out the tests to go beyond the basic implementation now.

Misc

  • Finished The 48 Laws of Power. It took ages, but a pretty interesting read.
  • Also finished the first in the series You Don’t Know JS.
  • My pre-order for Ryan Sande’s Trail Blazer came through which I am super excited to read. A good non-technical trail running book is always a win.
  • Clearly loving the reading.
  • Have at least 4 articles to write, just need to find the time.
  • Getting back into the exercise and feeling good.

Conclusion

The last weeks have been awesome. The UK was great, time in the US is going well. Over the next week I’ll hopefully get to writing more articles, look into Go and JS more, and get some good work done on the Visa package.