Since March until now, much has happened:

Life

• Grandma passed away end March. Wake. Funeral. Reconnecting with family after 15 years! They had not been in touch while Grandma was alive, due to family drama.
• Travelled to Seoul, visited Korea & close friend of 15 years, who drove us around for a few days around the Jeolla-province.
• I am sick with Covid (as of writing). This is my second time but my first official time (since my first time, I tested negative all the way)

Learning

Programming: I have had a change of direction, sparked by an issue I faced while programming my app. While I was trying to program my own iOS app, I was facing a number of problems which seemed to be… fundamental & basic.

Then I chanced upon Derek Sivers page about learning Javascript, someone mentioned Launch School’s philosophy. I was like, wth is that? So I went to check out Launch School, and realized that this was the program I had always been looking for…

Our program is about slowly building up mastery of fundamentals, so you understand how higher level abstractions truly work from the bottom up. Our goal isn’t to teach you how to use React or Rails, but to show you how to construct accurate mental representations of first principles in order to tackle fundamental engineering problems. Our goal isn’t to help you find a job, but help you launch a career. Our goal isn’t to teach you to code, but to teach you how to deconstruct and problem solve like an engineer.

So I started the Launch School prep material in end March 2023. Still working through it! I have completed the modules on Command Line & Git. The Launch School materials are the best prep and intro to using the Command Line & Git for complete beginners, which I’ve encountered. The material is all free, too.

Now I’m working through the Ruby prep materials.

Listened

• Jessica Livingston & Carolynn Levy’s The Social Radars: loved the Paul Buchheit, Creator of Gmail — The Social Radars, and the Garry Tan episode, for different reasons. Buchheit’s thriving on the build-ship-iterate repeat loop is something I desperately want to go too…

Read

• Three Body. It’s a GREAT novel.

Watched

• The Whale – Great show, fantastic acting.
  • It made me realise that, a blind spot for me, is that my focus on doing good & encouraging others to do so can come across as me thinking I’m better than others!
• Hunt – Korean drama about Korea in the 80s, turned out that a lot of it was reality, which I found out only later!
  • Gwangju Uprising
  • A military dictatorship
  • North Korea plotted and executed an assassination plot against the South Korean president in central Southeast Asia (the attempt in Hunt was set in Thailand: real-life was Myanmar), which narrowly missed killing the South Korean president
• Beef – psychology is quite accurate, but it is also so much: social commentary, great acting, and the ending is really, really… unexpected.

Workout

Again, changed. Focus on building a firm zone 2 base, so nowadays in a week:

• Zone 2 workout on Mon, Wed, Thu & Sunday
• Rucking on Tuesday
• Daily, I would do pull-ups, one-arm push ups and train to do pistol squats (still building up to 1!)