I’ve been at a loss as to what to write on my blog lately, as I haven’t been doing a lot of code stuff that isn’t directly applicable to my work. Was chatting to Georgie, someone I work with, and she suggested I start doing a monthly blog post.

I totally nicked her idea and template for reviewing the past month of my life. I guess I’m committing to doing this for the next year or something.

Lets see how it goes!

Just before writing this, I was:

Cooking my own version of paella :D

This past month, I achieved:

  • Getting the ball rolling on some mental health stuff I’ve been meaning to get into for about a year now. I’ve struggled a lot with it for a few months now, and it’s had an impact on my personal and professional life, so I’m keen to implement some positive coping mechanisms.
  • Finished one(!) book in the month of February
    • Walkability; my notes on this book are maybe coming soon, and you should definitely read it
  • Started four other books
    • The Genius of Birds
    • Pachinko
    • A Field Guide to Lies and Statistics
    • So Good They Can’t Ignore You
  • Did a bunch of refactoring of some legacy code to make it more testable and reusable, which was such a good feeling and made me feel better about my abilities and intuition as a software engineer
  • Got back into Dungeons and Dragons with my uni crew

This past month, I learned:

The importance of always picking up more domain knowledge. I did a fair amount of time learning about a system that my team owns, that I didn’t really have much knowledge of up until now. I was keen to get some context around it since we’ve made some positive improvements to the system structure over the past few months.

I’m pretty proud of my team for making those improvements, and also impressed at the light touch they made to a system to make sure it worked with incremental improvements over time.

This past month, I got bored of:

Hackernews. It’s almost all just advertising and self-promotion anyway.

But that’s OK, because I enjoyed:

Drinking way more tea, and going to Canberra twice.

Have a GIF of people throwing paper aeroplane requests on stage at a Ben Folds concert I went to in Canberra

Today, something that made me happy was:

Honestly not really sure, today was a bit hard.

Today, something I could’ve done better was:

Pulling myself out of a situation where I felt uncomfortable and stressed, instead of pushing myself further than I should and getting nothing done.

Tomorrow, I’m going to

Go see a queer movie with a friend for the Mardi Gras film festival!

In March, I’m looking forward to:

  • MARDI GRAS 🏳️‍🌈
  • Many parties (for the first time in months I have a party on every weekend in March???)
  • Autumn leaves

In March, I’m going to make the positive change of:

Going birdwatching! While I was in New Zealand, I found a book in a bookshop (which I regrettably did not buy) titled “The Art of Mindful Birdwatching”. I need having a solid reason to go outside and explore nature now that I’m getting a bit bored of my usual walks. Birdwatching will hopefully provide me with this, and I’ve already started borrowing some books from the libraries about birdwatching.

One thing on my to-do list is:

Finish my team introduction to the React’s shiny new Context API.

One happy photo from this past month is:

Going to Sydney City Limits, my third(!) music festival.

After I post this, I’m going to:

Think about all the productive things I should’ve been doing instead of writing this blog post.