202212201757 Present

Now – 20 Dec 22

Work

Since October, I started doing some freelance work. Sidenote: You can read about my Propositions here.
The first (small) gig was a Design Thinking training that a friend asked me to help her conduct, for herself and her small team. This was to be her farewell gift to her team. While she left a public testimonial as I had requested, I completely didn’t propose any of the wording in her embarassingly-lavish-praise here.

The freelance work is but a stepping stone: the longer-term vision until 2024 is to explore the intersection of Dharma principles, human-centred Design, and Digital technologies. I was forced to articulate my North Star, as I started getting a LOT of queries and possible opportunities coming my way, which I found frazzling tbh. So I wrote the vision as a way to clarify my North Star for myself.

An important part of my longer-term vision is to make stuff for my own use. To that end, I have also started learning Python and revising Clojure (revising the Anki cards I made while learning Clojure a year or so ago). I’ve also used Python to create some automation scripts, though, I have since come to realise that… I don’t have that much to automate…. :p
But it has been eye opening and interesting to learn Python, including the Django web app framework (which made me realise that I intuitively dislike the MVC separation, for some reason! It feels overly complicated & complex & bureaucratic…) The main materials I have been using for learning Python in the past month have been two books:

  • Python Crash Course, 2nd & 3rd Edition
  • Automate the Boring Stuff
    Automate has been particularly helpful in giving example scripts that show how to do things, like to shrink photos by 75% (very helpful before I post them on my blog!) or to clear my desktop of my many many Screenshots. I have also gotten books on using Python to
    a. automate my financial tracking
    b. produce dashboards showing my financial investments
    I intend to make those, and to keep track of local copies of my finances, so that I know my personal “runway” (right now it’s a bit of a wild-assed guess).

Another big update: in 2023, I am going to switch from Python and Clojure to focus on learning mobile app development. I had previously tried to concurrently learn both Python and Flutter (a framework in the Dart language, which allows concurrent development of both iOS and Android apps). However, after spending an afternoon trying to troubleshoot some quirky Ruby dependency that prevented my iOS device from connecting to my Flutter IDE, it felt like I could better spend my time focusing on iOS (since I am an Apple ecosystem hostage captive user), and just get the ideas out of my system so that I can start using and testing them.

The other learnings I have from my Python & Clojure learning journeys are two:

  1. I’m much more motivated when I’m working on something I want to do and care about. E.g. the Python automation script to organize my desktop screenshots was a real problem I have and care about. So…. that took up a whole afternoon, but it was SO energizing! Many aspects of the coding learning journey can be a real turn off for me, without the prospect of doing something I care about. And I realise that, yes, web apps are nice, ditto for data visualization, but honestly, I don’t really care about them at this point, because the real beast that is sucking up my attention is my mobile phone. So I’m focusing on the iOS native mobile app stack, because that is where I want to build.
  2. I tried piecing together my own learning journey, using multiple Python sources which I had bought (Angela Yu’s 100 Days of Python, as well as Python Crash Course and Automate). I didn’t realise that it is actually quite a challenge to figure out where exactly I am, and this burden was a mental drain on my motivation.

So, learning from this, I am going to mindlessly follow and grind through Paul Hudson’s 100 days of Swift UI, working through the curriculum, which is based on the 100 Days challenge, and also focuses on teaching by doing (19 projects!) I’m looking forward to it. 🙂

Learning to code iOS mobile applications is my main focus for 2023, as it will be the main

Side Projects – 20 Dec 22

The one big thing has been Chat GPT. I spent one whole day playing with it in the afternoon, and it helped me tremendously in LEARNING. That was an unexpected outcome for me, & something that I will bear in mind.

A Dharma side project I am working on, is to develop a simple online course to Buddhism. A rough prototype is here: https://buddhism-without-bs.github.io/
Feedback is most welcome!

Another Dharma side project I am working on is to publish my previous Dhamma talks slides, using a very cool Python application called better-keynote-export. Using that, I published a talk on Right View which I gave earlier this year. You can see the page here: https://fatmonky.github.io/right_view/

Mulling Over – 20 Dec 22

> Last night, car carrying lil X in LA was followed by crazy stalker (thinking it was me), who later blocked car from moving & climbed onto hood. > > Legal action is being taken against Sweeney & organizations who supported harm to my family. > > — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) [December 15, 2022](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603190155107794944?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)
Twitter is a social media site. And Musk owns it. And he is now banning people from sharing open-source information about him, calling it doxxing.

Now, can you imagine if he was running a colony on Mars… and you’re on his colony? I honestly cannot imagine that.

Reading – 20 Dec 22

I’m on a reading sabbatical these two weeks: instead of my usual daily routine (coding in the morning, writing in the afternoon), I am focusing on reading and enjoying myself. 🙂

I recently re-read Scott Adams’ book How to Fail at Almost everything and still win big. It is SUCH a good book, even if I don’t always agree with him on Twitter nowadays.
And as a result of that, I borrowed Win Bigly: it is SUCH a good book outlining persuasion techniques, and how Trump used them to his advantage in 2016! The book also persuaded me that perhaps I misread Scott Adams’ tweets on Twitter: he is perhaps less of a Trump supporter per se, but more of a trained hypnotist who was fascinated by how Trump used his ‘weapon-grade persuasion skills’.

I also borrowed This Mortal Coil by Andrew Doig, a history of death. It is a fascinating read: did you know that childhood deaths were the most common cause of death in earlier human history?

Other books I’m reading on this reading sabbatical:

  • Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: I started but abandoned this, as it seems to (a) echo the paradigms of object-oriented programming, and (b) is interesting but seems impractical.
  • Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile: the annual re-read. It always opens my mind.
  • Michel de Montaigne’s The Essays: a selection: bought this in India but never finished this.
  • Tocqueville’s Democracy in America: I never finished it.
  • A couple of Oxford University Press’ Very Short Introductions. I particularly want to re-read the VSI on Fungi, but also read the one on Microbiology.

Other Stuff – 20 Dec 22

Listening
I’ve been listening to these workshops on Right Samadhi, by Ajahn Brahmali and Venerable Sunyo: I’m still making my way through the last workshop day’s recordings (I tend to listen to these talks while working out), but so far, they have been a gem!

Meditating
30+ mins a day. A recent Friday guided meditation by my teacher Ajahn Brahm is here

Working out
Shrimp squats + 16kg kettlebell clean & press + barbell deadlifts + pullups on MWF.
Zone 2 runs on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Yoga Body Gravity Yoga M-F nights before bed.

Updated as of 20 Dec 22