April showers bring May flowers

This post is just a summary of my month of April. I was in a lull at the beginning of the month but I started to get more aware of myself and started reading, writing, and doing things to get myself out of that initial lull.

Books

I finished listening to At Home by Bill Bryson in April which was a nice listen. It was a good summary of the past 250 years of history about things around the house. Like why we have different rooms like closet, kitchen, and bedroom. Where do we get the concept of having lawns? There were so many interesting facts in this book, I couldn’t keep up!
I also listened to Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson. It was a fun and quick listen, it’s a great intro book for astrophysics and the author makes everything pretty approachable for a non-astrophysicist.
I finished reading Aladdin by Yasmine Seale which I didn’t enjoy as much I was hoping to. It’s too simplistic and that might be because of the original book and not the translation itself.

Health + fitness

I’ve been getting more active recently. I started doing about 10 minutes of yoga every morning and I’m trying to get back to riding the bike about 1-2 times a week.
I’m also trying to be more conscious of what I eat but that hasn’t been a huge concern for me. I try to limit myself to some meat throughout the week and not everyday.

Code + side projects

I worked a bit on Bookends in April but I didn’t make a huge dent in all the things I’d like to get done before I consider the app ready to be used. I am deploying as many small changes as I can. Each time I am adding something new, I’m having to rethink about the models I’ve already set. Once I got search working, things have gotten a bit easier to work with. Next is just getting a nice user flow going and not removing all new user data on each deploy, I am doing this to avoid any unforeseen issues since I’m treating the current version of the app at bookends.app as an alpha release.
I’m hoping to spend more time learning Ruby in May as I’ve gotten super busy at work and haven’t been able to spend any time learning concepts and language specific oddities.