I had somewhat mixed feelings leaving Finland once again. Somehow I had already got used to the daily routines in Ylikiiminki (and the awesome food prepared by my mother ;)) and it was really nice to see friends and family after 2,5 months on the road and spend time with them without too much hurry. But then again I’ve really missed the warm weather, sunlight in the morning and the possibilities to meet new people and network.

The first days in Corralejo have been great and the place feels like a nice place to spend some time. The work space + accommodation + gym setup here is excellent: it takes about four minutes to walk to the co-living apartment from the coworking space and the gym is only two minutes away from the apartment. There are also grocery stores and restaurants nearby. Compared to Funchal – my previous travel destination – the vibe in Corralejo and Fuerteventura feels more touristic in general, but so far it haven’t been an issue. Corralejo seems to be very laid back and relaxed place to be at least this time of year.

Exercise Plans

I also put together a combined strength and endurance training program for next two to three months. I set few physical condition related targets for 2017 for myself so I’ve tried to take those targets into account in the training program. Some of the targets for 2017:

• Run a half marathon in a competition
• 25 pull-ups
• Do every challenge from the Tikis exercise challenges book (and eventually get into Tikissä-level in each category)

Despite various limitations Ylikiiminki provides very good gym facilities so I already started to follow the training program’s gym training part. However I managed to run only once or twice a week in Finland due to various reasons, but I should be able to focus also on running here in Corralejo.

Overall plan:

• Exercise six days a week in various intensities and have one rest day
• There will be three gym trainings and three or four running exercises every week
• Easy week every 4. or 5. week

The gym program is a combination of few different programs:

• Variation of a 5×5 strength training program
• Tikis pull-up challenge
• Tikis abs challenge

The running program:

• Polar running program with minor tweaks
• Aims towards a half marathon later in the spring

 

Web Development

The traveling preparations and traveling has taken quite a lot of time this week so the web development progress has been somewhat limited. However I’ve managed to setup quite nice development environment and tool chain using available web services. I ended up with the following setup:

• GitLab for GIT repository hosting, project documentation (wiki) and simple issue and task management (issues and boards)
• Shippable for CI purposes like making sure the builds, unit tests and integration tests pass
• Heroku for hosting the web services
• Slack for project communication as well as tracking notifications from Shippable and Heroku about CI and deployment statuses

It took one very long day to setup the services and get the automated tests running for the Node.js+PostgreSQL back end component, but once I got it working it was very fast to setup the build, test and deployment pipeline for the React.js front end. There are still many things which are not completely clear for me, but with the current setup I can start developing web services quite efficiently.

All the fore mentioned service providers offer a free tier – which is super nice – but when the development gets serious I’ll most likely upgrade some of them to get more performance and availability and then again I find it reasonable to pay something for services which are well made and truly useful and beneficial for me.

The current stack is meant mostly for the development phase; for example I’m not yet sure how and where I’d like to host the production version of the service. There are also few services I’ll consider adding into the service stack at some point:

• Service for collecting server log information
• Service for checking if my web sites are up and available

Summary

I’ve set up a development environment for React in mind and I have some initial UI mock-ups to work with for the web service I’m developing so I can start the React component design to get something visible done very soon. I have grand plans for coming months, but I feel like Hub Fuerteventura is a good place to get some work done. I’ll gather a more thorough review about Corralejo and Hub Fuerteventura after few weeks or so.