Treefingers

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So over the past few months, I’ve been trudging along slowly to add basic features to Bookends. If you haven’t read of my other posts, Bookends is a project I’m working on by myself to create a book tracking and discovery website. There are many reasons as to why I’ve been making slow progress but the main ones that I’ve noticed, I wanted to talk about in this post.

Node and Expess.js are great for small projects as I’ve built a couple of small applications of some sort with them, an example being the URL shortening service: Go. It was a quick and fun to build but there was something else that I didn’t realize until I continued adding common features in Bookends. When I started adding models and talking to the database, I had to rely Sequelize. But this isn’t a complaint against the tools, it’s mostly the ecosystem, I am often able to find a package for something in node but there isn’t a framework that dictates some sort of standard. Building an app comes one step at a time and one layer at a time with Node.js, unlike in other ecosystems where the conventions come with the framework.

Well, enough ranting about that. I’ve been adding some features to Bookends and I’m hoping to finish the book profile soon to launch the beta for people to try.

I just finished listening to Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. I started listening to this after finishing his book about Australia called In a Sunburned Country which I wrote about recently as well.

I really enjoy Bill Bryson’s style of writing, it feels approachable to me. Without spoiling much of the book, the book is a high level overview of how “everything” came to be. Whether it’s the book you’re looking at or the audiobook, the length of the book in either case is not long enough to justify he would be able to describe nearly everything. But that’s the caveat, it’s a short history of nearly everything.

I finished the book with a sense of knowing more about some aspects of where the universe came from, how life came to be, and how humans came to be. It’s satisfying to be able to get that information in one place.

I think compared to In a Sunburned Country, I didn’t enjoy this book as much because it didn’t have the Bryson travelogue writing style which I really enjoyed, especially in audiobook form. But still, if you’re looking for a fun to read/listen book, this is a good one!

I’m in Mexico City right now but I can’t keep my mind off of Venezuela. Mexico City is beautiful, food is great, and people are nice but every bit of time I get where I have some time with my phone, I’m reading about what’s going on in Venezuela.

Until earlier this week, I was actually not aware of what was happening in Venezuela and I was, especially, not aware of what has been happening since the death of Hugo Chávez.

If you’re like me a week ago, right now there is an economic depression sweeping all of Venezuela as the government struggles to support its populace with basic necessity like milk, sugar, coffee, basic hygiene needs, and health care. I won’t go too much into details about all of what’s happening, there are better sources for that here:

• Al Jazeera
• New York Times
• BBC

I am writing this more from a perspective a moderately informed American. I keep up with major news stories and I read into things that interest me beyond tweets and headlines but this one has completely escaped my radar. It’s also surprising that nobody in my circle of friends has posted about it on twitter or facebook. At least that means that there are 500+ people in some capacity who haven’t read or read enough to share about the crisis in Venezuela. I’m upset at myself for not finding out more about this earlier but now that I know, I’m looking for better sources to get familiar with the topic.

From the outside, the Venezuelan crisis looks like any other crises that oil-relying nations go through but I’m curious to find out if there are external influences that affected Venezuela differently than say Norway in the 60s or Kuwait in the 80s.

This does give me something to read more about and learn because I don’t want my blog to be a political opinion blog so I wanted to share this from the perspective that it’s possible to miss out on big news like this and then the best thing to do is to be informed about it.

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.