Just before writing this, I was:

Finishing off my migration to Travis CI from CircleCI.

This past month, I achieved:

  • 🧘‍ Doing yoga on a Thursday night for the first time - turns out that the Thursday night session is really bloody hard
  • 🧗‍ Trying out bouldering for the first time
  • 🤔 Starting to do some challenges on leetcode, to get better at algorithms and thinking more in terms of time complexity when solving problems
  • 🔍 Did some research about the new async/await syntax in Javascript, including the benefits of and how to transpile with minimal overhead
  • 🎤 Did a short talk based on my research in asynchronous component loading using react-loadable in the Javascript crew
  • 🎲 Finished off the D&D campaign we’ve been running for about a year - this game really forces me to engage my imagination in a way that I don’t really do in every day life
  • 🛠 Made one open-source contribution - contributing to a neat Javascript library that allows you to do asynchronous work on an interval
  • 🎶 Saw the Book of Mormon
  • ✅ Kept to my positive change of reading more and started on a few new books, and recycled out old books that I wasn’t ever going to start or finish

This past month, I learned:

The incredible compounding effect of learning over time and making positive changes in your life. Learning a wide range of skills and behaviours that can build on top of one another allows you to become a more effective and happy person - and is the focal point of a book I started reading yesterday.

Fixing small things in your daily routine can have an incredible multiplier effect - whether that’s writing down all the things you did every day to reflect on how you are progessing, or rethinking how you organize your kitchen.

This past month, I got frustrated with:

My inability to focus for extended periods of time on a single topic. I think we’re all guilty of this in the modern world, but I’m especially bad because I try to cram as much as I possibly can into every day. I end up pretty miserable with my progress too. Learning to take it a bit slower is hard but probably worthwhile in the long run. I am taking some cues from my friend Jay’s blog post on “experiment” exercises, where you focus on a particular topic for a few weeks, and learn as much as you can about it. Put your full effort into it, and don’t evaluate it until the very end.

But that’s OK, because I enjoyed:

Some really nice hangs with people I haven’t seen in awhile.

Today, something that made me happy was:

The adorable child wandering around the cafe I got my morning coffee from.

Today, something I could’ve done better was:

Perhaps not going back to sleep after 7am.

Tomorrow I’m going to:

Go to work and maybe do a bit of post-work exercise.

In November, I’m looking forward to:

  • Sculptures by the sea and a foraging tour of Centennial Park
  • Webdirections Summit - I’ve been keen to go to this conference for about a year now, and finally it’s almost here. Excited to meet new folks and learn a bunch along the way!
  • An Alex the Astronaut gig
  • My friend Rachel moving to Sydney!

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

Bouldering and improving my relationship with sleep.

I’m going to try and go bouldering EVERY Wednesday night of this month, which will prove challenging given how fucking sore I was for the 3 days following. But it’s something I’ve been told that you get exponentially better at when you do it on a regular basis and focus on improvement. We’ll see how it goes.

I was reading this crazy long article about enhancing your relationship with sleep. It recommends biphasic sleep as a good mode of sleep for creative types, where one has a 6-8 hour sleep at night and a half hour to full hour nap during the day. I’ve always thought that biphasic sleep was for me - I spent a lot of my uni degree working and having a restful nap during lunch time and I found it pushed me to do more creative, energised work with the time left over - and I’m keen to give it a go again.

One thing on my to-do list is:

Read more about React Hooks.

One happy photo from the past month is:

A photo of some (train!!!) street art I saw in St Peters.

After this post, I’m going to:

Go for a bike ride before lunch.