Almost half way through. Things are getting serious!

Overall

Last week started so good, but by the end I was re-evaluating my goals… allow me to explain…

Emotional 😫

Saying no more
When I first got to RC, my strategy was to say yes to everything.

“Want to work together? Yes!”

“Want to go to X? Yes!”

“Want to learn about ? Yes!"

I love when others are excited about things.
I love getting caught up in their excitement and encouraging it.

But it can also be very distracting from what I’m excited about.

Sometimes it feels like saying no to an invitation will leave me with nothing to do. I forget all the things I’m excited about doing: improv, dance classes, parks, climbing, reading, etc., etc.

There’s all kinds of activities I’ve been continually deferring. I haven’t even been to Central Park yet! I’ve been wanting to do that since getting here…

Finally made time for an improv jam last week. Really happy about that.

Focusing on practical knowledge
On a similar note, a lot of things I do aren’t that practical. Most meet-ups and tech talks are interesting, but cover topics that I don’t have any practical use for.

It can be good a few times a month for getting exposure to new ideas, but most of it I have no use for.

When I look back at what things have been most interesting, it’s the projects I’ve finished. Not the tech talks I’ve listened to.

As a result I’m going to start cutting back on things I don’t find especially related to what I’m working on. Hopefully that will leave more time for getting projects done.

Social 👏

RC Events
I’ve been slowly getting sucked back into the RC events. It’s so hard to reach the end of the day, see that something is being organized and then leave. Also really difficult to work in the space when chairs start being moved around and everyone is talking.

So I’ve just been getting caught up in things.

This week there was:

• A presentation on building a vulva drawing tool
• Hip-hop dancing
• Job fair
• Halloween party

Pretty good stuff for the most part 🙂.

Improv Jam
I started researching improv jams around the city. Turns out they’re everywhere and really cheap.

Sunday I went to one with a fellow RCer and it was great fun. I felt very nervous/excited at the start which made it hard to think. Can’t wait to work through those feels by performing more.

Definitely plan on doing more jams and meeting more improvisers in the city.

1-on-1 with a Random RCer
Last week a bunch of people signed up to do randomized 1-on-1s with other RCers. It was actually a wonderful experience.

I had the joy of going for coffee with @lushi and @yuliaju.

I want to make sure this happens next batch as 1-on-1 time outside of RC is some of the best bonding time.

Intellectual ☕️

Vim
Last week I was chatting with an RCer and watching them coding with Emacs. That obviously got me sidetracked into changing text editors…to Vim!

It made for a bit of a grueling week. I started by looking around at all the options:

• Vanilla Vim?
• Neovim?
• MacVim?
• Vim + Janus?
• Vim + An open source config?

Along with each of those came the question of what plugins to install, what shortcuts to add, etc., etc., etc.

Once I had everything installed, I then needed to dig into the configs so that all my favorite Atom functions worked (multi-cursor, linting, file-explorer, etc.).

Once that was all done, it was time. I could finally…sit at my computer for a week struggling to master the keyboard.

It’s been a week though and I feel frustrated when I use Atom. I think that’s a good sign 😊.

EpubPress for 🔥🐺

I finally heard back from Firefox about EpubPress!

It was such a back and forth:

“Hey, we need you to upload original source files.”

I did! I swear! Here’s a zip and a link to the github repo. Dig around all you want.

“Can you please add instructions for building the source files?”

Here are the instructions. But FYI they’re also in that repo I sent you…

“Why am I seeing this error while trying to build?”

Oh no! Because you are running on Windows. Linux plz.

“The built files don’t match the files you submitted.”

The built files are all on one line. A single character could be different and the diffs would be off. Is it because I have different versions of the dependencies installed? Gahhh…

Here’s a build that isn’t optimized.

“Please submit a build that isn’t optimized.”

I just did…

“Oh…we’ll look through it ASAP.”

KK thx 👍.

So hopefully that gets resolved soon…

P5.js
Friday night I decided to open up P5.js and give it a whirl.

That quickly devolved into being fully sucked in. Over the course of the next day I started experimenting with randomly generated bubbles and easing functions.

Here’s a janky .gif of the result:

Spoke to some other P5 folks around RC and got some tips. Next project: Matrix Code!

Physical 👊

Meditation
At the end of last week, a fellow RCer and I began doing brief meditation sessions. It was a very relaxing way to start the day and something I want to keep up.

Dancing
Always dancing!

A RCer hosted a mini Hip Hop class which was a lot of fun. The Halloween party at Founder House had a big dance floor which I also took advantage of 💃.

Cooking
I checked off the Chicken Parmesan recipe from Food Lab. Made for an excellent week of lunches.

It seems like every day there’s some event with pizza…ate pizza for dinner at least 3 times last week. 🍕

</End>

I feel more aware of the things I want to invest time towards these upcoming weeks:

• Getting back into my Haskell course.
• Building out crazy P5 visualizations.
• Build out a substantial system with Haskell.
• Go to more social events in New York (eg. Couchsurfing meet-ups).
• Improv jams.
• Exploring the city.

This week is the last for the current batch. Sad to see them go, but hopefully many will still be in New York and swing by for visits on the regular. At the same time, excited for a fresh start with a new batch. I hope they can live up to F1’16!

Thanks to @vaibhavsagar & @sotojuan for providing yet another week of blog feedback!