I’ve adjusted to my new routine, I’ve successfully swapped my morning routine to an evening routine. This means I’m racing to the gym after work instead of comprimising important hours of sleep in the early morning. Studies have shown that neglecting the early morning hours of rest is deterimental to memory and learning. That’s according to the sleep scientist, Matt Walker in his book Why we sleep. So I’ve decided that I can reverse my routine.
That book has been fairly influential to me in other ways. I no longer drink coffee. Not because its unhealthy, which it isn’t really. More for the fact that it can impair your ability to sleep well and I know how impactful a bad night’s sleep has on running, gym and thinking at work. That being said, I do yearn for a warm cup of coffee from time to time.
Someone offered me a free cup of coffee and whilst I thanked him for the gesture, I declined. After he’s puzzled gaze seemed to have lingered for more than I could stand, I qualified my ‘no thank you’ gesture with, ‘ I don’t drink coffee’ which I hesitated to mention and all of which I needn’t have done if it didn’t seem so weird that I didn’t want a free coffee. I got the same puzzled look when someone offered me a slice of pizza and another instance back when someone offered me chocolate: I always say as politely and graciously as I can, ‘ thanks very much but I’m ok’ because I don’t want to offend their goodwill but sometimes they are adamant that I’m being unusual! I like to be actively involved in my day-to-day decisions and its like my training - I stick to it. You’ve got to listen to yourself and respect your own choices and see them through. I like carrying through with my dicisions, otherwise it would’t be me!
I went for another run on Wednesday and it was great but tiring - I went down to Limehouse basin again but instead of running back up or going along the Thames, I went up another canal, adjacent to Regents canal which is the one I came down with towards Limehouse Basin Marina. It was so nice.
It was quiet and it was flat and winding. There was lots of graffiti and I’ve come to really embrace this form of street artwork on my runs. I probably wont see better quality and creative instances anywhere else other than in Shoreditch and surrounding areas.
I’m started becoming fairly familiar with these longer runs and I routinely take a gel with me and drink it at around 1 hours into the run. I’m now thinking of taking water with me too though I’ve not been one who’s been used to running with water. I’ll try it because it will make my run easier methinks. Here are the details of my last long run:
I recently started a new university degree and I’m looking forward to this year’s two modules. The first one is about continuous professional development which is about analysis of 400 hours of my last professional projects in software development with the view to assess/predict my future directions in the industry. This is a fairly interesting and a new way of doing things for me as I’m used to the more direct, technical things like learning how MongoDB works or designing mobile apps or programming full-on. I’ve not done this kind of assessment before: I’m going to have to do more reporting and analysis modules like this moving forward I think, ultimately culminating in my professional project which is the capstone of this degree. The other module is more on par with traditional direct teaching - the software engineering bread butter stuff I’m more familiar with: teaching you software engineering best practises etc around software planning and management such as source control and requirements gathering etc. My last module was quite heavy into python and data analysis so I’m offsetting things a bit by doing the slightly more theoretical stuff first perhaps as a strategy to recover from all the programming! I seem to recover in training by resting and I recover from studying by studying something something slightly more different and less familiar.
I think its safe to say that I wont be having much free time, especially at this level of study.
I’ve been working on my investment tracker app in my spare time, I’m learning a great deal about many things, primarily investing in general but in terms of software development I’ve learned an incredible amount about Angular 6+.
The last few features that I needed to implement were graphically representing some of the underlying investment data I have, This is primarily drawing visualisations. I’ve cobbled a pie, bar and interactive directed graph visualisations. I’ve not really learnt how to master their construction however I’ve not needed to in order to meet my requirements. So now I can easily see how various aspects of my investments relate(directed graph) and how over subscribed I am to certain aspects - a bar graph because easily shows equality inconsistencies more than I pie chart. Here is what the bar graph looks like:
The features of my investment tracker are complete. This is a great thing to achieve because its been a project that I’ve dynamically invented requirements as I’ve recognised the need. The last feature I implemented was what are called custom aspects. These are ways that you can define aspects to define an investment in a more specific way. It’s anologous to properties I guess and I sure I could represent it as this. This is how it looks:
It’s basically custom aspects where the default aspects or ‘entities’ of an investment are Factors, Risks, Groups and Regions. So now you’re not constrained to defining your investment by just four aspects - you can add as many as you like!
I’ve also strayed into the world of modal pop-ups and this has got me into trouble when I’ve got lots of data like as is the case with the shared relationships graph - the directed graph I mentioned earlier, see:
My goal now is to use it - because that’s why I developed it in the first place. Being a software developer must be one of the best jobs in the world as its all about thinking, modelling thought and solving problems in space. It’s truely fulfilling when you apply your fascinations and desires into it.
I also decided, for the first time in a long while, to fire up the XBox 360 and play a few games. I’ve purchased 3 games which is a bit OTT because one game usually takes. Like 3-6 months for me to finish. However the 3 games are all appealing and would quite probably make the succession anyway. They are Fable 3 which I’ve started and I’m enjoying tremendously as its very much Kingdoms of Amalur however I yearn for it to be more like it. The next 2 titles are in the queue and they are Castlevania, something to do with Dracula is the story. The next is Metro: Last Light which is not like the others - this is a first person shooter and It looked great when I played the preview more than I year ago - this is how long it been since I’ve played properly on my XBox!
I’ve got a day off today and I spent it developing the bar graph in my investment app. I’ve also been learning Perl and I’m fixing to use it on something. I really enjoy reading books on the train to work. I’ve not played any games today but maybe I will later now that I’ve done all things I wanted to do with the investment app. I’ve been writing perl for a while but I’m trying to improve:
Oh and I’ve got Linux running on my Windows 10 box which is Great! I’ve installed an X server and I’m using xfce4-terminal which is far more superior than Windows’ default terminal. I’m very happy that Microsoft has invested so much in Linux this way because really this is now proper Linux within Windows the only difference is that the windows kernel is servicing the underlying the syscalls the apps request. Awesome. Not sure how this will influences the Linux kernel...as we’re not using one...
I also started to think about Parameter type validation recently.