Author: neil

I like to think I am open to meeting new people, and experiencing new things. In most instances, I am. Socialising, as much as it’s ‘socially’ important, is one of the most draining things I am required to participate in.

You can take a person out of <insert place here> but you cannot take <insert place here> out of the person, is an epithet I’ve heard often. The exhaustion today stemmed I think from the reminder that most of the folks I had to politely engage in conversation are very similar if not alike to what drove me out of my state – both of abode and of thinking.

There were two exceptions that caught my attention: one, a golden retriever and two, a 4 year old boy with an unique name.  Both were in new circumstances, and adapted the best way they could. One stayed close to its master, and ignored everyone else while managing to look cute. The other called the world as he saw it, and managed to embarass his parents when  they were within earshot.

If holidays are meant to be refreshing and relaxing, then choosing who and how to spend that time with deserves attention.

2021 ends in a couple of hours. The sounds outside are a mixture of kids squealing with joy, loud music and yelling, frogs croaking, and sirens blaring every so often.  The rest of the family is watching Harry Potter, while I type out the >95th post here since consistently from September the 24th.

I’d like to think of this year as another one that taught me a lot about what was truly important. Whether it was through illnesses and trauma of close family, the undescribable and unforgettable support of my friends around the world and down the road, my own ill health, the joy of helping people succeed, the heartbreak of watching several good ideas get crushed through politics, the never ending uncertainty thanks to CoVID’s still continuing destruction, people moving on from their roles, people leaving the the world of the living, getting to meet new people halfway around the world, discovering the amazing strengths of those around me… I could go on and on. It’s been a wonderful year of learning about myself, and of rediscovering a small circle of true friends.

I’m blessed beyond measure – my wife and kids, my colleagues, and the community I live in have all made 2021 one to be cherished.

Happy New Year to you, my 2 readers. I hope you too can count your blessings and look forward to more in 2022.

The 100 day experiment has given me some useful systems, habits, and insights into my own emotional cycles. I’ve done retros a couple of times about this.

The consistency of writing a blog post, practising calligraphy, and ending the day with journalling, and the actual time it takes to do these things have been a pleasant surprise. I’ve become the type of person that does these things consistently.

I began thinking of this post as a way to review how I’ve lasted 100 days. Time to celebrate, or some such thing. Just after I opened a tab to start writing here, I made the mistake of turning to Twitter a couple of hours ago. And so two hours later…

It was a stark reminder that habits – or distractions – are powerful forces. Unless I’m deliberate about them, and clear about the boundaries I chose for myself with distractions (it’s a fine line between education and crass entertainment online!), I will rue wasted time.

There’s a list of things I wrote a couple of days that have been on my mind. These are broad themes in my nightly journaling. I’m going to attempt a fortnightly sprint, tackling one every fortnight or until I’m comfortable that it has become part of my identity.

I will invest time tonight into building a plan for the first sprint, and learn to do it in a tool called Notion that I’ve seen my daughter use. Identity based, process driven and outcome-expected are all getting some attention.

The close of the calendar year. Time for celebrations, perhaps.

I remember, as a child, the effigy of an old man being burnt at midnight by youth (perhaps inebriated, I was too young to remember, but I’m pretty sure that was a thing!).

When I got a bit older, I would hang out with my ‘friends’, for a very few years, at a ‘ball’, watching enviously as the more hip guys danced with the hot girls, while I sat behind the band in my well-worn clothes, and borrowed shoes. I remember the distinct pleasure of getting my own shoes, and the distinct pain of the shoebite when I wore it for the first time to one of those ‘balls’!

For a couple of years after we got married, we stayed up late the last few nights of the year, watching a movie or having people over in celebration of the ‘new year’. The desire to stay up late disappeared when the kids arrived, raised its head when we moved continents, disappeared again until local friends’ showed up wanting to celebrate new years at our place, generally inviting themselves and counting on our polite non-reluctance.

I suspect we’re going to have ‘guests’ over again this year, but for the next night or so, I’m going to enjoy blissful sleep 🙂

I’ve been slow to realise how much of a beneficiary I am of the Open Source Software community for a while.  The operative word for me being community. What gets people to contribute to a project that doesn’t seem to have a discernible ‘leadership’ team that drives outcomes?

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been asking my colleagues how someone like me could get involved in such a community. After all, I can barely code, I am certainly no developer, and the extent of my programming skills focuses on identifying the big problems worth solving for in the context of where I work. So for all practical purposes (read excuses reasons for not getting involved), I have nothing to offer.

I do realise that writing is something I can do reasonably. Translating tech-speak at work I am not too bad at. Could I use these skills in the OSS?Yes, is what I’ve been hearing a few people say. It does require me of course, to understand the tools of the trade, and source control software such as Git/Github are some I ought to learn how to use.

So that’s what I have been up to the last couple of days. Thanks to a video I found by ‘amigoscode’,

I’ve been discovering the magic of how these things seem to work in practice. I learnt git init and git show and git status and git add and git commit and git push and git pull and how these little bits of code work.

I’ve struggled with learning how to code – the mental model I have of learning other things hasn’t translated well into code learning.  I tried Dr. Oakley’s technique: 20 minutes of watching video and following along, then taking a break to think about what I did, and then doing it on my own. It’s become quite useful already. I did get stuck when the instructions didn’t match the problems I was facing. Having to figure out what the problem was and then fixing it on my own has been quite satisfying.