I recently released my post on 2018, which covers everything that happened to Devblast and myself in 2018. Writing it was a great retrospective. Since it forced me to look at everything I did (and more importantly, didn’t do), it ended up being a great learning experience. That’s why I’m even more confident that writing updates is the right way to keep me on track.
I felt, however, that the monthly format I mentioned before would be too much (I wouldn’t want to be writing only life updates), so instead I’m going quarterly. Here’s what happened in the first quarter for 2019, the good and the bad.
What went well
Bringing some help for Modular Rails
At the end of last year, I started talking with someone who was interested in helping out with the reviewing and editing of Modular Rails. He was using the modular approach in his business, and found it so useful that he wanted to help me improve the book to spread the word. I can’t blame him thinking the book wasn’t as good as it should be - I wrote it 4 years ago and never really updated it. I was really excited to be able to work with someone on it.
A few weeks after we started talking, I offered him a partnership that would make him a co-author of the book. We spent some time chatting on the best ways to work together and we ended up deciding that I will finish the Modular Rails 5.2 update I was working on and have him edit it, and he would take over for the 6.0 release.
Things ended up changing at the end of the quarter though. I wanted to spend more time focusing on other projects: Devblast, a side-project idea (named “Scrivi”) and a potential new book. We talked about it, and he offered to simply take over the 5.2 release, freeing my time to finally fix Devblast and spend time working on Scrivi.
Publishing Master Ruby Web APIs and Modular Rails online
I started working on publishing MRWA online, so that anyone could read it for free. It didn’t go as planned, because the codebase of Devblast wasn’t great. I wrote it a long time ago while I was learning Elixir and, let’s just say, I’ve learned a lot in the past year and a half working full-time with Elixir at OmiseGO.
I put the addition of the books to Devblast on pause, and focused on refactoring and adding more tests to it.
New habits
I talked about the new habits I wanted to have in 2018 in a nutshell and I’m happy to share that I’ve been doing them almost every day for the past 3 months.
I ended up reading a bunch of books, lost around 9 kgs, learned a lot of new Thai words, reduced my Triathlon sprint time by 15 minutes and was able to wake up early more easily. Overall, doing all this stuff has really improved my quality of life and happiness.
What didn’t go well
Not everything was perfect. I don’t think I wrote enough content for Devblast, because I was too focused on Modular Rails and Devblast. I don’t really like writing that much, and will always prefer doing some coding, but I’m going to try to add a bit more writing to my weeks, even if it’s just 10 minutes per day.
I also didn’t spent much time working on Scrivi because of the shift in my priorities.
As usual, it was hard balancing my time between Devblast and OmiseGO, but by waking up early and putting Devblast first, I was able to always get something small done before starting my OmiseGO day.
What’s next?
With Theo taking care of the Modular Rails update, I’m going to focus on publishing Master Ruby Web APIs online on devblast.com and get Scrivi into a usable state so that I can start using it every day. I’m also planning to write more, and not just life updates!
