Finally Some Physical Exercise

Last week(s) have been quite work filled. Due to the broken rib I’ve mostly surfed between the apartment, coworking space and cafes and grocery store. Luckily the rib is getting better every day and yesterday I took a 3 hour walk to a nearby hill which offered very nice views over the Corralejo and nearby area. This was the first time for two weeks I reached my daily activity goal and it felt great to be able to move and get heart rate up while climbing up the steep hills.

Tech Stuff

This week also offered few other nice details. I’ve now been working in a customer project involving mobile app development using React Native and it’s definitely an interesting project and good opportunity to learn more about mobile application development. It’s fast and easy to get stuff done with React Native since I’m already somewhat familiar with React from web development scene. There are some differences between React and React Native, but many of the popular libraries are available for both platforms.

Even if I don’t like every aspect of JavaScript I have to appreciate the fact it’s possible to write web service back end, front end and mobile applications using the same JavaScript programming language. It is not anyway necessary to be able to write all the services and system components using a single programming language, but it definitely makes things easier for developers to get things started and keeping up with the latest changes. Web application development and mobile application development used to be completely different worlds, but in these days the gap is not that big anymore and it’s getting smaller and smaller every day.

I also made the decision to write the article series about setting up a basic-but-modern web development environment for a single developer or small team and utilising available web services where possible and reasonable. Related to that I’ve continued to learn Docker and the related services and tools and I think I’ve now squared the basic services and tools I’m going use in the articles as well as in my own project I’m building up at the same time

Non-Tech Skills

Spanish

I mentioned earlier I started to learn Spanish on January and I’ve continued to do that (almost) every day. I originally though it would take a month or two to complete the Duoling course, but now after six weeks my Spanish fluency in Duolingo is only 27 % so I guess it will take few more months to complete the course. Usually the Spanish practice is the last thing in the evening I do which is definitely not the optimal time for learning so I’ll try to get the language practice done earlier in the day; in the end it usually takes only 15 – 25 mins to do the three exercises and reach the 30 xp daily target I set for myself.

Photography

I’m also planning to learn more about photography and improve my skills even if I only have a mobile phone to shoot with for the moment. To get something concrete done I decided to start following a photography challenge. The photography blogs are full of different kind of challenges, but the one I selected seemed to contain interesting and diverse subjects. In the beginning my target is to do the photo shoot challenge every other week until I complete the Duolingo spanish course.

Memory

I’ve encountered similar news articles already before, but when I read an article about improving your memory by doing short daily practices I started to wonder if I could try out something similar myself. Better memory and memorisation techniques could be useful while learning Spanish and other new things. I haven’t yet investigated the subject much nor decided what memory improvement technique or course I’ll start to follow, but I’ll investigate the subject a bit more and start the exercises next month or so. Memocamp was mentioned in the referenced article, but most likely there are other similar web services as well.