Treefingers

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.

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. 

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P.S. I miss Samson. 

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 🤦‍♂️.