Archive

This month I…

• Decided to change the format of the newsletter, I wasn’t sending the weekly newsletter as regularly as before, so I’ll try sending it monthly, hopefully with more useful information.
• Started working on my own emacs config without doom for fun, it’s still not even close to ready, but I’m taking my time and learning it on my way.

These past weeks I…

• Joined a new company and that’s my excuse for not sending out the newsletter, which isn’t really a great excuse because I don’t work on Sundays. Anyway…
• The new company has been great, I’ve been learning a lot and not doing much coding, yet…But so far I’m enjoying it :).

This week I…

• Enjoyed my last week before starting work on my new company, I’m excited! And since I’m sending this newsletter late, I can tell you that the on-boarding is going well :).
• Managed to contribute a bit to the Arch community in the form of editing the fabulous wiki, which was a pleasant experience, takes a bit to get used to how to write in that wierd markup language, but it’s fine once you get the hang of it. Being on IRC is helpful.

This week I…

• Continued on my mini sabbatical from last week. I forgot to send out the newsletter, but last week was my last week on my current company (previous :)). This week I was still relaxing and the next week, I will continue to.
• I was thinking about making my own conference for read the docs, but I procrastinated on it, I watched only 4 talks so far.

This week I…

• Worked on my last full week at my current job, it was emotional in many aspects, I’m having some mixed feelings about leaving, I’m going to be missing a lot of people, but at the same time, I’m going to have a mini sabbatical which is something that I’ve dreamt for a while, next Monday is my last day at work, and then I will start my mini sabbatical. The plan is to do my own private conference and then I’ll check my big todo list for more things to do, if you have any advice, reply to this email.

This week I…

• Am attending the roguelike celebration conference, which is great. I haven’t made games in a while but I love the topic, and it’s interesting to see how different programming is for this different discipline.

This week I…

• Got and played the game Gloomhaven “Jaws of the lion”. If you like boardgames, and have player or wanted to play the best board game according to BoardGameGeek, , you should try it.

This week I…

• Updated my plan page and . TL;DR: I have quit my job. I realised I like working remotely enough to apply to a company that I’ve been on the lookout for a while which is 100% remote. Otherwise, it was an uneventful week.

This week I…

• Skipped last week’s newsletter. I had nothing to write about.
• Have been following Cal Newsport’s work more closely. I know him and his books but I never really read them or applied anything from him. I subscribed to his podcast and I highly recommend it if you are a knowledge worker.

This week I…

• Have been watching a lot of “Below Deck”, you could say I’m addicted. And I was never someone who enjoys reality shows, but the fact that it’s a “reality workplace” makes it more interesting. I’m planning on writing a few blog posts with lessons on leadership from each of the leads in the show.
• am sending this newsletter quite late again, but at least I am sending it. I’m thinking about whether to remove this constraint of having to send a newsletter every week, even with not a lot of content, or to just wait and collect some stuff and only send if I have enough. What do you think?

This week I…

• Was on holiday, didn’t do anything “productive” this time around and managed to relax properly.
• Took the gaming PC out and played a bit of: Minecraft, LoL, Vampyr (been waiting to get this from Humble Bundle and it came out this month!), and have been continuing to play Dead Cells on the switch.

This week I…

• Set up my old OnePlusOne with LineageOS as an experiment of using a google-free android phone. So far so good, but I know that I can’t have a single phone if I got this route since banking apps don’t support weird Android Roms like lineageOS.
• Found out about , I’m not sure what one could do with them right now, but it looks like a cool tech to explore.

This week I…

• Sent the newsletter late :D.
• Didn’t do as many reps as I have been doing, maybe because I was a bit more tired this week.

This week I…

• Attended Europython online and it was great. I loved the combination of discord + video. It enabled me to check the notes from other talks that I didn’t attend and will be a great repository of information when I actually watch the talks, it also enhanced the talks I attended by giving it a specific forum where people could talk about parts of a talk in depth.
• Not really much apart from Europython, my work was very focused so that I could leave to the conference without many things to worry about during my holiday.

This week I…

• Have been focusing on something I can’t really share, so I didn’t have much time for reading cool articles, so I don’t have much to share this time.
• My gaming pc is still unplugged and will remain like that for at least two more weeks, I miss it a bit, but I love having the extra time to read and write.

This week I…

• forgot to mention on the last newsletter, that I played with Deno at work and enjoyed it, here is the code I produced as I played with it.

This week I…

• Wrote 2 blog posts:

This week I…

• Was on holiday for the whole week
• Played Red Dead Redemption 2 (but Gil, I thought you finished it last Sunday! Yeah, but what if I complete the game again, this time, slowly?).

This week I…

• Got very tired, maybe it’s because next week I’ll be on holiday, maybe there’s too much work and I’m not feeling like I accomplished much…or maybe it’s just normal since it’s been a while since I had a holiday, or that at least it doesn’t feel like I had one…
• Didn’t send the newsletter on time again :(.

This week I…

• Didn’t use the planck to write this newsletter, so hopefully, there will be a lot less typos, sorry about the previous newsletter.
• Am sending the newsletter very late, on a Wednesday, sorry!

This week I…

• Got the planck ez, which I’m trying to use just now to write this newsletter. I got some very clicky keys, which are awesome to type in, but the ortholinear layout is a bit difficult to use. We’ll see how I get om with it, a lot of people seem to prefer ortho to staggered, so I’m really curious to see if this works well for me.
• Am still using emacs, felling better and better, although I used vim a little bit and was reminded of how it feels to use an editor I am really used to (It feels great).

This week I…

• Didn’t work on Monday, since it was a bank holiday, I took a long walk outside to get out of the house and move my legs.
• The week felt quite packed even thought it was only 4 days, I was as tired as a normal week, I guess I need a holiday…

This week I…

• Kept on using emacs for work, I’m getting more and more used to it. I’m even writing this newsletter on it for the first time.
• I realise that I never talked about how I write this newsletter, so here it goes:

This week I…

• Used doom emacs at work. There’s still lots for me to get used to, but I’m slowly getting there. The discord community certainly helps a lot.
• I’m still in my quest to find the perfect way to streamline information, I’ve been reading about other systems like . But I’m hoping that once I’m happy with emacs, I can switch to org-mode + org-roam and ditch vimwiki.

This week I…

• Published my first npm package

This week I…

• Learned how to use vercel’s to make my own url2markdown service, it works, but it’s early days, I’ll later write a blog post with my findings and how I integrate it with my knowledge system.

This week I…

• Published a book on Leanpub.
• Found of writing more, will try to use , but I haven’t yet.

This week I…

• Got my first Lego kit in ages, the amazing Pirates of Barracuda Bay set, haven’t finished it, but I already love it, I hope this is not the beginning of another obsession…

This week I…

• Moved my twtxt host from Heroku using ToH, into my . Which feels much more natural, just like the way twtxt was meant to be, and also I don’t have to deal with Heroku’s emails telling me I’m overrunning on the free clocks.

This week I…

• Was still on holiday for two days, until I…
• Got back to work, it was a weird unproductive week, partly due to work, partly because it was hard to get back into a routine. The thing about these holidays spent at home, is that what I really treat myself to was a lack of schedule, I did want to be productive, but I also wanted to chill out, and I managed to do both, but my schedule really suffered. Maybe I should prioritise getting a proper routine after all.

This week I…

• Was on holiday…home
• I had some plans for this week, was going to and was going to learn Rust, write more, be super productive, but the reality is that I just spent a lot of time playing Animal Crossing and Halo (Finished the Reach), baked some bread, and built my new 3d printer (an Ender 3), I’m trying not to beat myself up too much about it because we’re in a pandemic, but part of me, earns for those breaks in the day that helped me make a routine…well, a routine, and doing them artificially, like taking a shower before starting to “work” feels, well, artificial. But I’m happy, I did learn a bit more of rust, built a little for breezometer in actix, so I been “productive”.

This week I…

• Worked from home every day.
• Settled on a kettlebell routine (it’s called , I haven’t finished the book, but I’ve been doing 5-10 sets of 10 kettlebell swings + 5 sets each side of Turkish get ups).

This week I…

• Worked from home from Thursday to avoid being a vector of contagion. Mixed feelings about it, I love staying home, but not because I have to.
• Cancelled my trip to PT since the conference I’m giving a talk in was delayed to November.

Note: This is a late newsletter I should’ve sent on the 8th

This week I…

Gil’s Week #202009

This week I…

• Attended a Codebar workshop as a coach.

This week I…

• Learned about the dot language to draw graphs in ascii art, I also learned about graph-easy and dropped it into a shell script (using Docker because it’s a perl script and I don’t like having to install CPAN on my machines) to try it out, but so far I haven’t used any of them for drawing useful graphs, just to play around. Also found this website which lets you draw ascii art in your browser, it’s the coolest of the options.

This week I…

• Was sick on Monday from food poisoning :(
• Didn’t drink any caffeine (just didn’t feel like it and continued not drinking)

What notable things happened this week

• Created this newsletter
• Was invited to in Oxford

This is the first ever newsletter for all the first subscribers (or curious future readers) to get a glimpse of how the newsletter will look like in the future.

What notable things happened this week

If there’s anything relevant to highlight this week such as meetups/conferences/things that happened, I’ll highlight them here.