I ended up staying in Finland longer than I originally planned. However my apartment rental and other arrangements here in Oulu are now in order so it’s time to move forward.

Fuerteventura

My next workation destination is going to be HubFuerteventura and I’m travelling there at the end of the month. It took some time to plan and decide where to head next since most of the popular places in Canary Islands were full until spring. In the end I got accommodation and work desk from HubFuerteventura so I decided to go there. The coworking space is in Corralejo which is a small town in northern tip of the Fuerteventura island. Corralejo seems like a cozy and nice place, but it’s also quite small. But then again I really liked Funchal even if it’s somewhat small place so lets see how is the Corralejo. I’m planning to stay in Canaries for about two months, but I’m not yet sure where I’m going to spend the second month.

Spanish

In Portugal I noticed it would be much easier to network and get to know locals if I know at least the basics of the local language. I wasn’t sure if it was worth the effort to start learning Portuguese – so I didn’t -, but now when I’m heading to Spain I decided to start learning Spanish. I originally though I’d participate in some Spanish language course when I get to the Canaries but I found out there are quite good free learning tools and courses available online. So I started doing some Spanish training this week using duolingo and I try to find 15 – 30 mins every day for the Spanish training for next few months or so. I might also take some Spanish classes after I’ve finished the duolingo course.

Web Service for Long Term Planning and Tracking for Personal Use

I mentioned last year I had some service or business ideas I’d like to push forward this year. This is one of those. I’d like to create a tool which would allow me to efficiently plan things in long term and track the progress visually. Wunderlist is one of my favourite apps at the moment, but it doesn’t provide the features I’d like to have for long term planning. Luckily Wunderlist provides an API for accessing the data so it should be possible to build a new service which could use the data from Wunderlist (and other similar services with APIs).

The Internet is full of different kind todo apps and progress tracking tools so I’m not sure how unique my idea is, but then again I haven’t yet found a service which would provide the features I’d need. I’ve had the opportunity to use software project planning tools such as Jira and TargetProcess in the past so I have quite good idea about their strengths and weaknesses and I try to put my experiences in good use in a bit different context in this project. If I manage to create a service which is truly useful for me I’m quite sure there are other people as well who could find it useful. Based on recent discussions with my friends these kind of services could be much more than just simple tools and I also see the potential. But let’s proceed one step at a time.

Even if I’d like to make a useful and popular service for public use the #1 priority in this project is learning new tech. These are the core learning targets:

• React, Redux and ES6
• Other javascript and css techs needed for modern front end web development
• PostgreSQL databases
• Cloud based CI, deployment and test automation services
• MongoDB or similar NoSQL database in case I need one

Initially my plan was to do the back end server using Go, but after playing around with it for a day I ended up switching back to Node.js. I’ll focus on learning more about front end web development in this project and look into Go another time.