Treefingers

I wanted to talk about setting New Years resolutions and goals in general. I’ve had a realization in the past few years of setting goals and acting on them. Goals that have measurable metrics like weight lost in pounds or number of books read are easy to track but pretty linear. By that I mean, they’re not goals that will require reconfiguring mid year or rethinking about what the ultimate goal is with numbered resolutions. By the end of the year, I forget what the original reason was for the goal and treat it like a timed chore until the winter holidays.

For 2019, I want to set the simplest of resolutions. To be organized and simplify things around me. And as vague as that sounds, I want to explain it in this post.

First, 2018 has been a messy and confusing year for me. From traveling, learning, and working, things had been filled to the brim with unexpected and exceptional things. I didn’t feel as satisfied with some of the trips I took because I felt stressed due to a something happening back home or at work (luckily no major crises). For learning, I kept trying new things without going deep into anything. The good part of that has been that I got to try a lot of new things but I didn’t feel like I mastered anything.

Second, simplifying has always made me feel like I have a better sense of what I want to do and why I am doing it. An example of this is actually this blog. Instead of relying on a convoluted updates process and hard to write posts in Ghost or on my own blog, I decided to use the industry-leading WordPress to blog. This led to less time spent maintaining or updating my blog’s settings and configurations of any kind. It’s almost no effort now because it’s easy to post and fortunately nothing breaks very often.

At work, a recent change I made is to switch from two monitors to one monitor. This is new so I can’t say with a certainty if it’s working out but I’ll post any updates if anything significant is noticed. It’s definitely to simplify but also to be more effective at the current task instead of just being “busy” without being productive.

So just like the above two examples, I want to find more opportunities to simplify in 2019. I believe finding the why is always important as it makes the goal more valuable in terms of what difference it makes in my life.

Cutting down on various interests that only become interests due to short term liking or hype will, hopefully, give me more awareness of what’s around me that I actually care about. Going deep into a hobby, project at work, or just learning something with a better understanding is my ultimate goal for 2019.

Wish me luck.

The year is almost over and it’s a good time to be reflective of what has happened this year, where I went, and just how I feel about it. 

First of all, I got married in 2018!! 👫

Trips

I recently came back from Portland and I decided to jot down some places I visited in all of 2018.

Places I went to this year:

• New York City
• Las Vegas
• Arizona (couple of small cities)
• LA (SoCal area)
• Portland

It seems like I went more places this year but I guess not. Weird because I felt like I took off time here and there that was for traveling but I guess not so much. 

Learning & projects

I’ve had a good time with learning new things this year. I decided to learn some more Vue.js and Node.js fundamentals. Learning node.js was actually more enjoyable because I could put together a whole “web app” after setting up a basic Express server.

I also started working on Bookends and I’m trying to spend more time working on it but the past few months have been unexpectedly busy which is not bad but it leaves little time for me to work on things at home.

For 2019, I want to continue learning new things. Hopefully, I’ll look into things like Ruby and Go, now that Weebly is part of Square.

Pets

Samson is a year and a half now. He’s super cute. Heisenberg is very cute still.

Music

I wanted to post my top songs of 2018:

A surprise #1 but others are not so surprising. 

My top personal favorites:

1. Raoui by Souad Massi
2. Vienna by Matt Costa
3. DNA. by Kendrick Lamar
4. Malembe-Malembe by Bonga
5. Kerala by Bonobo

I liked those because I was obsessed with each one for awhile at some point in the year.

For years, I’ve told myself I’m going to learn iOS. I have had an iPhone since 2011 and I use tons of apps on my phone every day. Since the introduction of Swift, iOS has become even more appealing. 

So about 2 weeks ago, I started working on some tutorial apps and getting myself in Xcode for at least an hour. By now, I have a couple of small “useless” apps on my phone that I am surprised were pretty easy to build. They don’t do anything that would require larger app design thinking for now, I mostly made them after following some tutorials to see if it’s even possible.

I created one app outside of the tutorials for a friend who wanted just a “prototype” of an app for school.

Now, I’m thinking of building some replicas to see just how easy or hard it is to build some popular apps. I often forget how long it took to make some apps that seem “simple”, in both the well thought out design and also in the lack of UI. 

In addition to building the iOS part, there’s also this rest of the app infrastructure that needs to be taken care of. I haven’t really learned much about how data is saved, design is done dynamically for multiple screen sizes. I’ve played only with a few mobile-device specific sensors like shaking. So far, I’m swooning over iOS. 

---

P.S. I miss Samson. 

I want to talk about how Conspicuous Consumption has led me to write this post, in a hypocritical state of mind if nothing else. As I posted late last night or early this morning, I am in Portland and it’s been a fun few days. I contacted a few friends to meet up and we’ve been catching up. One of my friends works at Nike and he gave us passes to get into the company store, so we went there today. 

I bought a bunch of stuff, and that’s not to brag, but instead to say it’s a bit disappointing that I did that. But hey, it was a “good deal”. 

The reason I am posting about conspicuous consumption is because this term got introduced to me while I was watching Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj. In simple terms, it’s when people buy stuff to show off to other people. If you’d like to read more about it, check out the Wikipedia article on it.

It’s something that’s been in the back of my mind recently and I’ve been thinking about examples of where I do this and don’t even realize it. Today’s trip to the Nike store has been a big one. I bought two pairs of shoes even though I have 4 pairs at home. The ones at home are all due to reasons I use them for, one for biking and everyday wear, one for a big more comfortable walking. And two “dressy” pairs of boots. 

I see conspicuous consumption all around me but it doesn’t bother me, it gets me thinking about how it’s something that the person wearing it had thought of doing. But hey, maybe most people don’t think about it like I do, most people just buy things because they like them and they don’t give it much thought. I don’t want to judge people wearing nice things, instead, I want to understand what they’re trying to show. Is it a lack of something else that is being covered up, or are they just trying to match. I am betting it’s the latter more often than the former. 

Conspicuous consumption is not bad in itself but it can be detrimental to a society when the patterns become reproducible and destructible. Reproducible in the form of marketing, repetitive hype cycles, and large sales throughout the year. Destructive because it can lead people to spend more than they afford, it can lead to jealousy instead of intended envy which can result in negative emotions of many kinds, and it can also lead to a retail cycle that’s too short for people to feel satisfied. 

I believe this pattern will get worse a lot more before it becomes a trap people will want to avoid falling into. 

I’m often reminded about how my parents don’t really think about brands (except for cars). They don’t see the appeal in a brand name or especially a brand name over clothing if the clothing is to be worn to cover you and not to make you a walking billboard for a particular brand which you paid money to wear in the first place. 

I’m in Portland right now. I’m here for a few days and I wanted to write that down so I can remember on my blog. 

I’ll be making a post for the whole of 2018 while I’m here but I’m just feeling like I should post often enough to keep a cadence going.

I’m currently reading a few books at the same time so it’s a bit hard for me to focus on one book 🤦‍♂️.

I was reading yet another article about how Facebook has been abusing user trust by dealing with their data among third-party companies (BBC). This is just one example of a couple of other recent “trip-ups” Facebook has had in the public: 

• Sri Lanka accuses Facebook over hate speech after deadly riots
• Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal
• Discriminatory ad filtering by Facebook

I could keep posting links like this but the reason I am starting my post with this is because every time I see one of these, I think of myself “where did I find this news?” and “is anyone talking about this on Facebook?” The answers are pretty obvious at this point, news like this is never found on Facebook, oddly because a majority of my friends are pretty well-informed about tech news so someone would definitely post it. So whether it’s Facebook’s filters hiding it from me or nobody cares enough to talk about it, I’m not seeing it. I often find news like this on any other places where I consume news like Hacker News or Reddit. 

Facebook is the perfect poster child for what now seems to be a bigger problem than just Facebook itself. The state of social media in 2018 is pretty glum because the companies have lost sight of their users in many different ways. 

Let’s take some other companies for example, Snapchat and Instagram. Instagram (IG) has been killing it with new feature launches and if they had unlimited money, they would keep making an experience that’s better each week but that’s not the reality. The reality is that IG is Facebook’s answer to Snapchat (SC) which at one point was threatening Facebook’s dominance over social media and IG was a less sophisticated version of itself. After stories came to SC, they quickly came to IG and the engagement was through the roof on IG compared to SC. At this point, SC was losing users to IG pretty quickly. Today, that’s old news. Snapchat doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of social media as an advertising industry. All social media companies survive off of ads (even Reddit), they take user data and turn it into conversions for their advertising partners. This isn’t news to some but it’s something to be fully aware of when using social media. Snapchat couldn’t figure out a good way to turn that engagement data into conversions, well enough to keep engaged users and also well enough to sell ad space to advertisers. 

Social media is not going away any time soon. Socializing in the form that companies promise in their press releases and product updates is not a real thing on social media of today. There needs to be a change to that approach. My approach to this is to use my blog my actively. Not everyone can do this and most people don’t want to do this. They already have a platform with many followers in places like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. So I’m not telling others to do this. I’m going to try this where my social media and socializing consists of blogging and email/instant messaging. If you’d like to talk directly with me, you can email me or message me on Signal. 

It’s time to go back to socializing one on one, small groups, close knit communities, and having a dinner party with friends over to talk about something interesting. When you have the whole internet watching, commenting, liking, voting, and trolling, you have to have so many filters or so much content moderation, it doesn’t remain natural.