I started doing these weeknotes at the top of 2020, so this one signals one complete year of doing my weekly reviews/notes in public. I thought it appropriate for a review!
Did it turn out to be a good practice? I think for me yes! Not necessarily for anyone following the blog (all 3 of you), since a lot of the weeknotes stuff might seem boring or irrelevant to you. But for me, forcing me to publicly write some thoughts about the past week has been good for my own self-awareness and keeping me writing regularly.
Archive for December 2020
Posts (11) :: Photos (9)Posts
-
-
This was the year when a lot of Christmas traditions were broken, due to the pandemic. There are cultural/country-specific Christmas traditions of course, but usually each person or family also has their own personal traditions that they do every Christmas. Here are some of mine: Christmas Eve dinner, or as it’s popularly known here in the Philippines, noche buena. Growing up, our immediate family/household unit usually celebrates Christmas Eve with a late noche buena, an extra meal that happened after dinner and starting at around midnight.
-
It’s the penultimate week of the year, and I’m sure I’m not the only who’s had enough of this accursed year and looking forward to moving on to the next one. I know that’s silly since the world won’t magically become better when the calendar flips over to January the first, but I think it helps our mental health to have this sort of “fresh start” mentality, even if it’s on an arbitrarily chosen date.
-
I’ve talked a bit about mentoring in software development before, and how early on I used to get feedback about me being “intimidating”. I never got any concrete feedback regarding that, so I don’t know what problems I had specifically. Though I was recently reminded of one particular incident that was a bit cringey for me personally. This was a bit more than 10 years ago I think. I was usually assigned to mentor new hires, which means fresh graduates who usually needed guidance with a Java (which was our primary programming language at that time) and with our in-house web framework, which could be a bit challenging to work with.
-
Time passes yet again. I think I have to get used to not having much personal stuff to report in the weeknotes on certain weeks (aside from the watching/gaming parts), especially given the pandemic where I’m at home 90% of the time. Speaking of the pandemic, the UK started vaccinations last week, and the US FDA approved the Pfizer vaccine as well, so hopefully this is where things start to turn around.
-
This week felt like another set of those moments-in-between, where not much seemed to happen, but it somehow still went by quickly anyway. I think the household and the family has slowly gotten used to the idea that any big Christmas celebration isn’t happening. My niece’s birthday was last weekend, so we sent her gifts via Grab delivery instead of being able to get together. Most likely something similar’s going to happen for gift exchanges on Christmas.
-
While digging through some old stuff recently I found a copy of the late 80s/early 90s US sitcom Perfect Strangers and decided to binge through all 8 seasons of it (really more like 6 and a half, since seasons 1 and 8 were an abridged 6 episodes each). I grew up watching this series, on live tv even, before we had cable or Netflix or anything like that. During the binge-watch I remember a good number of the episodes from the first season all the way up to the end of season 7, which implies almost all of it was broadcast on local TV, kind of a rarity I think?
-
A while back someone I know went from working as a developer to working at a senior/management type position at a bank, and that new job came with the corresponding dress code, which meant he was now going to work in long sleeves or barongs. That kind of thing is not for me - back when I still considered a regular office job, one of the fastest ways to get me to run away from an “opportunity” would be an overly stringent and/or formal dress code.
-
Last week, Twitter added Fleets, their own version of stories (short-lived posts). As could be expected, it’s not something I can relate to. I did post one (saying “This is dumb.") just to see what the interface was like, but that’s it. I thought about writing a blog post about how I dislike this sort of ephemeral social media, but it turns out that something I’d already written about before. Things don’t change I guess, and they just come around.
-
After playing through Super Mario 3D All Stars in October, I borrowed a copy of Super Mario Odyssey for the Nintendo Switch from my brother and played through it for most of November. Odyssey was the main reason I actually got a Switch; I played through a few worlds at a friends house during a single session and loved it, so I had been meaning to get the console just for Odyssey alone.
-
Rhythm of War is book four in Sanderson’s epic fantasy Stormlight Archive series. Goodreads tells me I read the prior book Oathbringer back in Nov 2017, but didn’t bother writing a review, so I had to make sure I’d write one now. The book’s launch day kind of caught me a bit unexpectedly so I didn’t bother doing a re-read of the previous three books. Which given an epic fantasy series of this scope might have been a mistake, but watch me do it again for book five.
Photos
