Life Updates, Moving, Work, Side Projects and Learning Plans

It’s been a while since I posted here on the blog so figured I’d do a short life update.

COVID / Health Check

First, my immediate family and I are still healthy. We continue to stay quarantined and limit our interactions with people outside our bubble. My retired mother has gotten her two shots of vaccine per her age/health group and my sister was able to get vaccinated through her job, a public school teacher. I was able to get my first shot two weeks ago and scheduled for my second shot at the end of April.

I’ve definitely had moments of mental stress and very much am looking forward to a few things as hopefully people can start getting together again but willing to self regulate as needed to.

General health check is, good. I do need to continue to up my walking now that the cold weather excuse is gone. I’ve been doing some walking but my daily step average is still low from what I was doing last year. My sleep is awesome. The CPAP machine is working well for me a year in now. Allergies have been a slight issue the last month but overall my medications are holding. I did start a light blood pressure medication which is my real goal now – to continue the weight lose so I can hopefully stop taking that pill but this might be in vain since high blood pressure is a family thing too.

Moving

Me and my mother have were at the old apartment for many years but sadly over the course of the last few years a number of issues have popped up and caused notable stress for us. We didn’t really want to move but eventually had to make it happen. We now are at a new place and are just moved in a week now as I post this. It has been a lot of work packing (and throwing stuff out) but hopefully will result in a more relaxing location. So good so far. I’m not sure if this new place is for the long term but we’ll see.

Work

Work has been good. I’m still doing Elixir / Phoenix work for the same client I started with back in October. The latest extension goes up to June 1st but they will likely offer an extension, at least for a little bit of time as I know they would like our help through a big progressive release, that is starting end of April and should hit 100% around June 1st.

I did negotiate a 4-day work week with my client, which started in mid-March. This extra day lets me have some focus time for my side projects – at least that is the goal. I got to be honest that the apartment move has taken ownership of much of this free time recently but at least this prevents me from burnout and still have some downtime per-weekend. Hopefully once I am settled at the new place I’ll get better use of of this personal project time.

Side Projects

Guildflow has been put on the back burner since January. I made the decision that I can’t invest any more serious time into the project until I can observe in-person meetups happening again. I still use the platform to run Philly Elixir but Guildflow is mostly dormant as far as marketing / new code efforts go.

Phoenix by Example is my current main side project. It has seen some slowed momentum with my apartment move but on the whole has been a fun way to organize my Elixir education endeavors. The next big sample project, RetroTaxi is underway. I hope to finish that project with a big push in May and hopefully come up with a small educational product in June and July time frame.

Learning Plans

While I am over the hump in learning Elixir I still feel like there is lots of opportunity for continued experience gains. PragProg has been pumping out even more Elixir books and I’m enjoying consuming them alongside my Phoenix by Example projects and work code.

All that said, like last summer with my Kotlin / Android Book Club, I would like to do some alternative language learning over the summer. I suspect this will be Rust / WebAssembly. I might do another book club but not sure yet. If you are interested in let me know and we’ll see.

Let’s Do Coffee

One of the things I miss is the happenstance catchups with people at IndyHall. If you want to have a virtual coffee with me, please grab a slot on the calendar and let me know how things are going with you.