Turning 29 and other things in June

This month has been a quick one, I can’t believe it’s already the 18th as I type this. Below is a short review of the month and my 29th year.

Continuing my habit building for reading, I’ve been making steady progress reading books and listening to audiobooks. This month, I finished up 3 books and one audiobook so far. The books were Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson, and How to Invent Everything by Ryan North. Each of these books is pretty different each other which kept me engaged the whole time. I was reading How to Invent Everything on my iPhone any time I was bored or had a few minutes, in a couple of months, I finished it which actually surprised me how little effort was required to finish it. I wanted to read a fantasy book that’s different than what I was into before (mostly Game of Thrones and Witcher lore) and Guards! Guards! is a good departure from that. I took a trip to Las Vegas and Los Angeles last week and so I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. My experience in Vegas was pretty tame and wildly different than Thompson’s characters’ but it was still a fun read.

In my last post, I stated that I’m stopping work on Bookends and over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to do next with my personal time at home. One of the big goals is to become more aware of myself, meaning more time spent being healthy which includes mental and physical health. I haven’t talked about this before on my blog but around the end of last year, I started seeing a therapist and it has helped my mental health a lot. I’m becoming more aware of myself and others around me. One of my main weaknesses is lack of empathy and I’m trying to hone that part of my brain. I’m also feeling less down all the time and excited (not just motivated in bursts) to work on new things. After I built some parts of Bookends and also my go link shortener, I realized that some things just take time and others will come with time, e.g. building a useful version of the link shortener took a couple of iterations but spending time learning node.js and some javascript concepts I didn’t understand helped me move ahead with confidence.

For learning in programming, I want to start focusing on ruby mainly because I use it at work and secondly because I want to build things using a different technology stack (rails, Sinatra, non-JS tools). The next few months are going to be focused on learning ruby and trying to build some tools with ruby.

In other aspects of my life, nothing major is going on. I am hoping to spend more time become self-aware and introspecting. Thank you for reading!