Now
What's happening right now, as of December 26th, 2020. For reflections on the past, see the page of Retrospectives.
To the imaginary friend that I haven't seen in a while, asking me what is up:
I've been working in a new company. It will be 8 months tomorrow. It's still great.
My life-long journey to becoming a good engineer is going on (it being life-long means that it will probably go on as long as I do, unless unexpected events). I'm focusing on prepping up for feature leading and evangelism.
Feature leading is a big experiment in holistic thinking, planning, and leading the development of a small feature and I'm very excited about it and humbled by the fact I'm allowed to experiment.
On the side of evangelism, I plan to write something interesting in the Elixir space. In the longer run, I intend to attend conferences and speak about interesting projects, but that's still far on the horizon.
I'm not running as much as in summer. I don't have much in the way of excuses, I'm just doing it less, at least for the winter.
The first batch of vaccines against COVID-19 has landed in Tallinn, so I guess I'll be able to plan trips again hopefully by the summer. It's lockdown time and I'm not going to bars or restaurants, just walking around. I plan to visit Italy, but not sure how soon.
Work-related OKRs
Write technical post
I haven't figured out on what yet, but it will come. Sure is about Elixir.
Grasp Elixir
- Read more books: on Phoenix and Ecto, to start with.
- The Advent of Code 2020 has been a great accelerator of my understanding. I have lagged way behind with the problems but I want to work on all of them. My deadline is December 1st, 2021 :)
Personal OKRs
Write novel
This is ambitious but I'm reading On Writing by Stephen King so it should come easily, right? :) The plan is at 1K words a day, for a novel of 180K words. If I have to scale it back to 500 words/day I'm still fine with it. King suggests to have a full book in a season, i.e., three months, so if everything goes according to plans I'll have a first draft by end of March. Fingers crossed.
Improve Estonian
I'm pushing on doing three lessons per week, and I plan to keep pushing.
Improve Russian
I got back on studying Russian and I'm glad I did. Also here, three 30-minutes lessons a week.
Listen to more music
I've subscribed to Spotify Premium and I pledged to explore music. The strategy is to listen to at least one piece every day from an artist I don't know (or even an unknown piece from one I know). I've been doing it for a couple of weeks already and it feels great.
Books
- My Goodreads profile says all about what I'm reading these days. I'm usually glad to accept friend requests if we know each other.
- The first book I've owned was Treasure Island. I'm not sure I've ever read it all. It was the unexpected and unwelcome gift of some idiot family friend who, however, actually made a good gift. I had just turned 8.
- I've read 300+ books between August 5, 1989 and today - click the link and select the "Read" filter.
Bonus: I have a TinyCat page
Me (a.k.a. The Mug)
I look like this today:
Acknowledgments
I credit Derek Sivers for the idea of the Now page.