Alex's Blog

Hello World

General 19th of July 2019

I've decided to start a blog for several reasons. I'll list them here first and then I'll introduce myself properly. Life is incredibly busy so I thought writing a blog would help me focus on some of what I'm doing and stop some of the feelings of drowning in "I don't know what to do next". I'm aware that communicating new commitments to the entire world about new routines that you are trying to start can be detrimental, but I'm extremely optimistic based on new-found discipline that I've managed to maintain recently.

Reasons I'm starting a blog:

• I'm getting married in three months to the day.
• I've set myself the challenge of learning Polish, my fiancée's native language.
• I've just joined a gym again with the aim to get healthier, lose some weight and stop eating like crap.
• I'm two months into a new software development job.
• I'm trying to finish a big programming project that's going on six years now.
• I'd like to write something because I don't have the time to write fictional things for fun anymore.

Marriage and Polish

Life has changed a lot for me in the last couple of years. The most obvious cause of that change was meeting Paulina two years ago. The cliché that life moves pretty fast has never felt as real as it does to me now. Two years ago I was self-employed, single and trying to find client work while developing a super-awesome web development framework. Working alone at home turned out to be an unproductive nightmare which promised each day to punish my initial enthusiasm with ever mounting debt. Now, I've never been so busy in my entire life but I don't think I've ever felt so at peace or like life has been filled with so many possibilities.

Let's go back a bit. I've been programming since I was fourteen years old and getting paid for it since I was eighteen. That means I've been a professional developer for twelve years now - yes, I'm thirty years old and yes, I'm definitely feeling it. For the last six years, my biggest hobby has been learning other spoken languages, which was as a reaction to getting fairly bored with programming languages. My Spanish is definitely quite far beyond intermediate and a couple of years ago my french was getting to be fairly decent. This is the main reason why the majority of my friends aren't from England. One of my best friends during the summer, two years ago, was a wonderful Spanish girl called María, the kind of person who personifies having latin fire in their veins. For months, she begged me to attend Salsa classes and when I finally got around to it, I was completely hooked. We traveled to Brighton together to go to events and managed to get some other friends involved in the weekly lessons in our town. Just as I was feeling like I had somehow managed to find a new social life and a hobby to fall in love with again, there was Paulina.

It's funny to think that I danced with her before ever having spoken to her or knowing her name. Each week I would excitedly come down for another lesson and get thrown into a group where everyone rotates to a new partner after learning the next part of that week's routine. I think I remember the first two times we really spoke. The first was at a Saturday party night, Despacito was still an ever popular song and was all but guaranteed to play at some point. I don't mind admitting that this song is still a guilty pleasure of mine and that it's currently the forerunner as the song for our first dance. When the song did come on that night, I was sitting next to her, taking a break between sweaty intense bursts of exercise that is dancing salsa. In a somewhat happy and carefree state, I inexplicably started to just translate the lyrics to her, childishly enjoying the cheesy pop lyrics. She told me later that this was the first time I surprised her, she had never come across an English guy who spoke another language before. I guess that makes me incredibly grateful that I've managed to maintain being such a geek for all these years.

The second time we really spoke was not long after on a lesson night. The conversation quickly turned towards languages and then turned towards the topic of English as the lingua franca. Apparently this shocked her as well, but the outcome was a pleasant one. Luckily, and unbeknownst to me, she's a highly educated woman who working proof-reading and editing publications back in Poland and also knew a lot about linguistic things. From that night on, we didn't stop talking to each other every night on Facebook, endlessly, about quite the variety of topics. A lot of stuff happened in between but six months later we were living together and nine more months after that we were engaged. Of course, I started to learn Polish, which is probably the hardest skill I've ever tried to learn. What's more, I became motivated to pick up some part-time work and stop the constant cycle of wishful thinking and a destructive financial lifestyle.

So, everything changed. That part-time job turned into a full-time one. After I proposed, I started looking for a "proper" job that would allow us to afford a wedding and I managed to find a very decent local developer job which has made me fall back in love with programming. Compared to those days I spent languishing in a mix of pitiable low aspiration and disillusionment, each day now is a crazy mix of trying to accomplish a ton of goals. I feel like quite the adult! Something to be proud of probably.

Will I ever finish my programming project?

The other thing that I want to write about here is my big project. It's called Abstraction Machine and it's an ambitious project which is a visual programming construct that should, in theory, allow people to build out simple interfaces (forms, tables of results) and then just insert code when they need to. In practice, it's turned out to be a project which has led me up the garden path and to many dead ends as what feels like six years of prototyping leading me finally to the start of the project. Maybe it was the time I stepped away from it as well, but I finally feel like I know exactly what I need to do to finish the damn thing, as far as having a minimum viable project is concerned.

What's also frustrating is that, looking back through my notes, I very nearly came across my current approach before but had written it off as too difficult or too far out of scope. Anyway, inspired by the best practices at my new job, which to their credit are actually amazing, I've rebooted my efforts with much more process and structure than before. No more do I wait months between enormous commits, no more are there zero tests, no more does it take a day to set up a working development environment again. I'm actually quite proud of all of the things I've done just in the last month so I'll be sure to write some stuff about that soon.

Daily Routines

Having a physical office to be at the same time every day has probably made the second biggest impact to my life in the recent past. Half of last year and half of this year my part time job was a driving one, now I don't have a car and I cycle to work three times a week. On the other two days I go to Salsa or go out with friends. It turns out that we really are creatures of habit and that the best way to improve various things in life is the discipline to convert something into a routine. It's amazing how I can just come home now and do some more programming whereas when I was home all day before, making being productive seemed like scaling Mount Everest. Currently, I use Duolingo every day to practice or learn some new Polish words (I hold an amazing 82 day streak as I type this) and I do some programming at home. Yesterday, I signed up for the gym for the first time in a couple of years. Some of my colleagues go before work or during lunch, which is so much more motivating than going by yourself. Today, I even burned off a few hundred calories and then was shown how to bench press for the first time in my life. It was 40 kilograms and some of my muscles in my pectoral area / group of muscles are aching for sure.

What I'd like to add going forwards is the following:

• Either go to the gym every day or have cycled to work and back. On the weekends I can go for a walk or do something else with Paulina.
• Check our to do list we have for our wedding. There's bound to be something I can make progress on there.
• Do more than just one Duolingo lesson a day. Memrise also has a really good course.
• Write something for this blog every day, no matter how short. I don't need to publish it the same day.
• Writing something short in Polish every day, even if I have to look every word up. Alternatively, start online practice sessions in Polish with a teacher. I have a wedding in Poland rapidly approaching.

Being a programmer and having written this blog from scratch (it's an extremely simple database application), I might add features to track what I do daily. I'm really looking forward to writing about what I've been programming, progress I've made in Polish and if I ever manage to lose any damn weight. Wish me luck everyone! Until next time.