A whirlwind of change has rocked my life since I’ve posted last, some of which has been the culprit for my lack of posts… I would look at the calendar and think to myself, “Wow, it’s been a couple weeks. I should capture some of what’s been happening.” Here I am now trying to highlight some of the major events and happenings since I last posted about five months ago. I’ll start with the highs, move into informative, then end on the low.
Getting Healthy
About the time I stopped writing posts is the time I started getting serious about my health. I’ve really been watching what I eat and try to do about 15 minutes of exercise everyday. Since tracking it, I’ve lost 75 lbs and am almost back down to 200 lbs. I’m back to where I was before I left Austin, TX four years ago and it feels great! Being physically healthy has really become a big part of my life so I plan to have more posts on what I’ve done so far and how I plan to keep it going.
Becoming a Home Owner
Almost a month ago my wife and I closed on and moved into our first house. We’ve spent the first five years of our marriage traveling from place to place and living in apartments so this is a brand new and amazing feeling for both of us. I enjoy living in a rural area with a big back yard and neighbors that are more then five yards away from me! Looking forward to working on the pole barn and turning it into a killer office to work out of!
Transitioning Away from Ruby
I’ve been using Ruby for a long time now, and it was truly the first programming language that I loved to write code in. These last four months I’ve written mostly Elixir both in and outside of work and it has captured me with the same great joy I got when starting off with Ruby. The performance has been amazing and the community top notch so far. While I’ll always keep a weathered eye on my first love, Elixir is now my goto tool for most jobs that get sent my way.
Getting Back to the Web GUI
Several weeks ago I participated in a company internal hackathon in which we broke up into teams, designed small applications, and went to town trying to implement them in 36 hours. I took that as an opportunity to play with Phoenix, a popular web framework for Elixir. While I have been getting a lot of good experience in with Phoenix, one of it’s big selling points of web-sockets is something I hadn’t yet dipped into. Naturally I was able to focus our demo around using web-sockets for real-time collaboration and fell in love with how much you could do.
Since then I’ve looked into tools that meld well with the functional languages I’m growing accustomed. I’ve decided to spend some time each week learning Elm, a web-client based language with some very interesting features. I haven’t done serious front-end development in quite some time, we’re talking since the MooTool and DoJo days for any who remember; however, this may be enough to get me dabbling in it again!
The Struggle …
A little over a month ago my uncle was diagnosed with very aggressive, terminal pancreatic cancer. There isn’t a day yet that goes by where I find my mind drifting toward thinking of him and the struggle he is going through. Rage, sadness, and an overall feeling of helplessness invades me every time I think about it. For those who know him, he’s an argumentative and stubborn person who lives life his own way – and I admired his fervor and strength.