Road Trip & Surfing

And another bucket list item checked! I tried surfing for the first time this week and it was fun enough for me to sign-in into a six times surfing course. I think I did quite well and managed to stay on the board reasonably well during the first session, but reading the sea and noticing when good and surfable waves are coming is still a mystery to me. I had hoped there was some kind of mathematical pattern for figuring out how often different kind of waves are coming, but apparently such pattern doesn’t exists. Too many variables. And according to the instructor this question is very often asked by engineers and other tech professionals :D.

Last weekend I got a surprise invitation to join a short one day road trip around the Fuerteventura island. In retrospective I’m glad I joined: the trip was a nice excuse to forget the work for a day and see the island in good company. The road conditions varied and the nature in the island is quite barren, but on our way to south there were few nice spots to enjoy the scenery…and lots of squirrels for some reason.

 

Slow Traveling and Co-living

Due to various reasons I decided to stay here in Corralejo for another month. I need to figure out soon where to head on April, but at least for next five weeks I can focus on ongoing work efficiently. So far the slow traveling has been working very well for me. Originally I thought I’d stay one month in a place, but then again staying a little bit longer makes things more easy. It doesn’t really affect to the living costs – unless you stay 3 to 6 months to get discounts for coworking, accommodation or gym membership prices – but at least you save some time and traveling expenses are a bit lower.

The co-living has been nice and the flat mates have been great! We have discussed about adult hostel idea (sounds dirty) with few of my friends in the past. It would be a reasonably priced hostel kind of accommodation meant for adults who are not interested in partying through the nights anymore, so instead of beer pong the hostel would offer other kind of activities to get the residents to know each other and have a good time. The co-living seems to be something like that at least here. Most of the occupants are 25+ year old digital nomads, workationists or people planning new businesses or other big life changes. There are still plenty of opportunities for partying and going out, but not in a distractive manner and the partying doesn’t happen in the apartments.

Tech Stuff

I’ve been thinking about writing more technical blog posts during the coming months. When I set up my development environment for the project I’m doing I had to dig and learn and put together information from various sources to get a decent development environment working and it’s still not finalised for production use. So based on that I was thinking about writing a short series of articles about setting up a modern and effective web development environment utilising available cheap/free web services where possible and reasonable. Most likely the articles would address topics such as:

• Source code and content hosting
• Continuous Integration and unit and integration testing
• Test server and test environment setup
• Production server and production environment setup
• Simple example web app using Node.js and React
• Development and deployment using Docker containers

It would take some time to setup the system and write articles about it so it would most likely take a month or two to get the first article out. But let’s see, it could be a useful and educational experience also for me even if it would require some serious effort.

I also made the “mistake” and asked about Docker in the hub one morning. The result was a 1,5 h tech talk session about Docker and virtual machines by our Croatian-Finnish-E-Estonian backend/devops/whateveryouneed guru Daniel!

Next Week

I was going to write about Estonian e-residency here, but I think I’ll cheat a bit and leave something interesting – at least for me – to write about for next week. So have a relaxing Sunday and enjoy the day light / sun!