Panina Press

This is my personal blog of thoughts, ideas, and happenings. About me: I love learning and personal growth! Currently growing my skills as a freelance web developer with focus on my personal lifestyle design

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Start Of My Day - #004

I am thankful for my family and friends. Yesterday was my birthday and I feel so loved by the simple act of wishing me a happy birthday. We're in a world of technology that reminds us when it's someone's birthday. On one hand, I could choose to think that many people only remembered because of technology but I'm overwhelmed by the fact that even after this many years of Facebook having this in place that people still wished me a happy birthday. It's not an automated thing and that many people took the perogative to say something. Admittedly I have seen that it's a friend's birthday and then think "oh I'll wish them happy birthday later" and then forget. Or I get stuck on writing something because especially with certain friends you want to write something special or at least a little more meaningful than the generic 'happy birthday' and then I end up writing nothing thinking I'll get to it later and then forget. Cards are actually worse for me because my family has never failed to send me birthday or holiday cards, yet there's me who can't seem to remember to do so in time or I get hung up on getting stamps or buying a thoughtful card. It's the elusive "adult" thing to do that "I'll get around to next year for sure." Some people actually use the Facebook birthday reminder as a way to decide whether or not to "unfriend" a person. We've gone through so many different scenarios of collecting friends from school to work events because inherently I think we know that connecting with people is important. Yet we now have a social network that is full of people we don't really connect with anymore. So for the friends who took time out of their day to wish me a happy birthday, it makes me feel loved and I'm sorry if I haven't been the best at reciprocating. For the record my preference is still to text you birthday wishes if I have your number, because having it is a sign to me that we are closer than a FB wall post. Yet I also appreciate the "let the world know how much I love you" aspect of posting endearing gifs for all friends to see. These are the moments that's invigorate me to keep working on my social project.

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Start Of My Day - #003

It's taken me a little more time today to sit down and write. Every moment of silence is nagged by soreness from today and past days' workouts. So here I am taking a moment to acknowledge the tightness in my shoulders and the dull, pulsating ache in my legs. I am thankful for this pain because I know my body will be built back stronger.

I've been thinking a lot about my side projects and how I would love to work on them but then a list of other high priority tasks flood my mind. However, these tasks feel like they'll never be done. Today I would like to figure out a good end goal for those tasks. Follow that up with some 3 actions for each:

An action that I can take immediately

An action for tomorrow

And an action for the day after

Got that idea from the book, The 4-Hour Workweek! It's good to take immediate action rather than delay or just waste time thinking about doing something (which I could definitely be better about).

List "high priority" tasks

Decide on their end goal. How can they be considered achieved?

List 3 actions for each, like described above

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Start Of My Day Note - #002

I am thankful for James who wakes up early to workout with me. I am thankful for this beautiful weather today.

Ahhhh, ok so officially 6 weeks until my first GORUCK Tough challenge. On one hand, I am terrified that I’m not going to be prepared enough, that I’m going to give up and not make it through. On the other hand, I think of a video I recently watched of Will Smith talking about how true bliss is on the other side of fear. He asks why do we put ourselves through fear and anxiety leading up to those moments? When actually in that moment, we are already in it and can realize there is nothing to fear. I know I won’t quit once I’m there, but fear of failure and to be honest, the physical pain of the endurance challenge, has me going through some mental hurdles to get to that start line.

Seriously as I’m training my brain will plead, “we did 3 sets, so we can stop here at 20 squats, we don’t need to do the full 50, right? …right?!” It’s a weird moment of will power to hear those thoughts, ignore them and push on through the exercises.

Do you have any moments where your brain attempts to bargain with you? Any tips for keeping that will power strong?

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Start Of My Day Note - #001

I am thankful for my partners. I’ve been working and haven’t left the house much this week so they took me out and introduced me to a new wonderful restaurant. I’m also really thankful for having freelance work that I enjoy.

Doing things with purpose. I’ve decided to share on my personal blog part of my morning routine. This doesn’t always make it into my morning but when it does, it’s been really helpful mentally. This is called my “start of the day note” where I consider what I have been thankful for lately, then just spend 20 minutes typing away what’s on my mind. It’s messy and generally unedited. So what’s the purpose?

The purpose is doing an internal check-in. What am I focused on in these early morning moments that is preoccupying my mind? What might interfere with my focus on the day’s tasks should I not take a moment and acknowledge them? Here’s the blog post where I got the idea from: The 15-Minute Morning Routine That’s Already Changing My Life

However, this check-in is just one part of my morning routine/productivity system. Tim Ferriss inspired me to start considering my morning routine in this podcast where you can hear about his morning rituals: http://tim.blog/2015/09/18/5-morning-rituals/

Here are the 5 pieces of my morning routine:

Stretch/workout

Start my day note

Meditate

Drink an XS

Inbox Zero/Daily Review

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Sad to be handing in my keycard. Thanks, Wix, for the amazing co-working space. *Cue Closing Time by Semisonic*

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Heading home after an awesome Saturday night of white boarding and code review!

[thesparkseeker-blog]

The steps to achieve anything! #thegirlfriendmanifesto

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Yes! Do this!

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HTML5 Alive or Dead session at #GMICSV2014

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Hiking in Sedona!

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My first Ramen burger and avocado fries with wasabi aioli!

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View from the Wix SF Lounge... I'll be hacking here for 24 hours!

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Coding by the pool so I can get some sun!

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Success! Learned how to copy files to EC2 instance

New job requires learning new things! Like how do you add files to an EC2 instance when you don't have access to the repository locally and are editing it live?

As I'm not the fastest with Vim, I created and tested the page locally using another project's repo via AptanaStudio3 and Sublime then simply copied the work over.

Side note: I know, I know! It's not the most efficient method but in the interest of my company paying me hourly, I just needed to get it done and learn to use Vim in practice.

This idea of mine worked great until I realized I have PNGs that can't be copied over like my HTML/CSS work. Have no fear, Google led me here: Stackoverflow "Using scp to copy a file to Amazon EC2 instance?" 

Easy peasy.

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One Dev's Comfort Code is Scary to Another

Hooray for having a job that pays! I've recently been hired to do some contracting work and have had to start learning new things, Python and Django. I was offered from the start that I could use Rails (which I've come to know and love) but then I wouldn't benefit from having help from our team's senior developer. Overall I know he's happy with my progress but I feel like I'm stumbling over things that I shouldn't be. Syntax just takes time and practice but some of this code looks downright intimidating to me.

We sat down and I showed him one of my Rails projects for comparison. Perhaps I took for granted how easy to read Ruby is or maybe I've just forgotten how scary it also seemed before these past 6 months coding in it. Either way, I was surprised when he said that Rails looked intimidating to him. I suppose that's just the point, yes you can pick up new languages quickly but anything new may seem odd and be clunky to get going at first. Eat. Sleep. Code. Repeat... and it'll get easier and faster.

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Question: How can you get a coding job and THEN learn the language?

Recently had dinner with a friend curious about this because as she stated, "I'm a journalist but I'd never get hired to write an article for a French magazine and hope to learn the language adequately enough." So the best way I could explain is that it's like talking to a pirate or gangster. You might be a little confused by their slang words but you can usually get the overall meaning.

Here be what I mean. This be me pirate talk and it's not that hard t' pick up if you know what you want t' say, buckos.

 -via http://www.fissio.com/pirate.pl

For a gangster example just google anything via http://www.gizoogle.net/

For code, just having a basic understanding of how it all works is really the first challenge but once you've got that down you can pick up the languages pretty easily. But that's just my take from learning to code via a 3 month bootcamp and now trying out new languages and frameworks on my own. What do you think?