At the beginning of last quarter, I made some pretty major changes and boiled down my priorities to the two most important things - Physical Well-Being & Dev Work.

There were good accomplishments when it came to improving my Physical well-being, like rehabilitating my knee and getting back into cycling and swimming to improve my cardio - but there is a still some improvement needed on staying consistent. The diet stayed about the same this quarter but I’ve learned some things that I think will make it easier to stay consistent and eat healthier moving forward. Generally speaking though, I fell off tracking diet and exercise for the first two months of the quarter. And without tracking it, it didn’t happen - that’s the biggest lesson.

When it comes to Development work, I accomplished quite a bit this quarter. There were several projects that improved my skills with modeling, drawing, and animation. I worked with a two friends to develop a Python product for the ABLE organization to generate badges from a database for an annual conference. I started on the Calendar/Scheduling App, creating a requirements doc and some visual mockups, but then spent time expanding this into a much larger portfolio of projects that will act as a system of tools later. With this came tackling a few new programming languages including html and JavaScript. And while I only developed 2 out 4 games planned, the few I made incorporated some more difficult skills I wasn’t planning on tackling until later in the year.

My friend Josh and I had a discussion once where he described an “everything room.” This is a concept where you have a single room or place where everything happens - sleeping, eating, working, entertainment, etc. The problem with an everything room is that when the physical delineations between spaces reserved for certain tasks are removed, the mental barriers can follow. When I sit down to work in a place where I typically also watch a show, my mind might think its time to watch something entertaining. Or if I eat there too, maybe it will tell me I’m hungry when I really wasn’t just a minute ago. And while all of these urges can be resisted, will-power is a finite source - one that is rapidly drained with constant challenges like these and resulted in a quarter that I’m not entirely happy with. Nonetheless, we still took some major steps forward and learned some important lessons that will need to be implemented in the future. And so long as we actually incorporate these lessons learned, then this quarter will have been for the best.

I’ll start with a review of my physical goals and then dive into the development goals/accomplishments.

At the end of last quarter, I created a matrix for tracking rehab, workouts, and calories, but it pretty much wasn’t used throughout the three months so it serves no benefit to reference it here. Generally speaking though, this quarter’s goals were to rehab the knee, slowly build up to a consistent work out plan, and focus on healthy eating. My knee is pretty much healed up, but I’m still taking it easy with the leg stuff and not running until I finish up physical therapy. In the mean time, I’ve been swimming and cycling to build up cardio endurance and slowly building back into the weight program - but most of this has only been consistent since June. April and May were pretty much a wash when it came to consistency and in June, I spent some time figuring out what the obstacles to keeping my exercise consistent were.

When it comes to diet, this pretty much acts as the foundation upon which all else comes. If my diet is not in order, then it kills all motivation to exercise, work, etc. I’ve learned some lessons here, including that simpler is better - the more I have to think about what to cook, the harder that barrier to entry is. There is still a lot to figure out to get things consistent in a way that works for me and there is also a lot of change coming in the near future which will present some unique challenges, but more on the plan forward in a future section.

Lately I’ve been thinking of my productivity like a percentage. And when I think about how I performed this last quarter with time spent on development, my initial assessment places me somewhere around 30%. As mentioned last quarter though, one benefit of doing these write-ups is that it gives me a chance to reflect and get a better assessment on how I performed over the last quarter. This last quarter involved learning a lot of new things I would’ve found pretty daunting in the past. Personally, one of the hardest parts of learning something new is that initial discomfort and feeling bad at that new “thing”. But once the momentum starts building, it helps strengthen my resolve to drive through that initial discomfort and getting past the “feeling dumb” stage. So this quarter, what originally was a complex problem that seemed daunting and beyond my capabilities, has now become just a typical challenge - another common obstacle to overcome and something I no longer hesitate to dive into. I’d still put my productivity percentage around 50 - 60%… but that’s because I know what I’m capable of.

Below are all the specific development goals I set for the quarter and the things I accomplished.

Two of the goals for this quarter were to 1 - continue working with basic Blender tools to improve my 3D modeling skills and 2 - start working with advanced Blender tools to expand my skillset. These two goals started blending (no pun intended) pretty quickly. I continued to hold myself to a 1-hour time limit for each model, but as I got faster with the basic modeling of objects, I started to use the extra time to dip into those more advanced topics like lighting, textures, etc. Once May came around though, Blender pretty much dropped off my radar and I have been meaning to get back ever since. Below are the models I created in April.

A big project, starting with info gathering in Q1, was to complete development of a Badge Generator for the ABLE Organization. Quick recap - the ABLE org is a US/Canada association meant “to promote information exchange among university and college educators actively concerned with teaching biology in a laboratory setting” (pulled straight from their website). My Dad was one of the hosts for the 2023 conference at UC San Diego and experienced a small unexpected obstacle become a big nuisance. They needed to create badges for all attendees, each with some personal selections, from a database export. One slight complication to this process is that that database references a few different info tables - great for database structures but a little too difficult for some of the simple and free resources out there. Aside from software behind a paywall, the only options were manual and very involved. My Dad struggled through for his conference but mentioned that something should be made to generate these badges automatically.

Myself and two friends took on this project as it would be a good test of multiple skills: creating a finished product in Python, working with a team of developers, and developing to a stakeholder’s specific needs. After a some back and forth, we released version 1.0. It was used to create a pdf file with all the badges and printed for the ABLE 2024 Conference - pictures below.

I’ve captured some additional features I’d like to incorporate, including shifting the focus to make it usable by the general public, but this new version will be developed in a future project.

One goal from this quarter was to begin development of a Calendar & Scheduling Application. This idea stems from my desire to build a calendar application purely suited to my exact use-case - but it serves as a good skill building exercise, and I figure if I have a need for it, there are probably others that could benefit as well.

Since starting it this quarter and running into other obstacles with my routines/processes, the idea has grown much larger. The long term goal now is to build a platform to manage the routine/maintenance aspects of my life, almost like an AI Admin that lives on my desktop. But to start out, there are smaller components that I can build separately, developing and testing each one, until they become the much larger amalgamation of all my tools and processes. After a lot of planning and breaking this idea down into smaller components, I was able to complete a requirements document of v1.0 of the Calendar app (with additional features being recorded for future versions), a visual mock-up of the calendar app, and began running through tutorials of creating a desktop application written in C# using Microsoft’s .NET platform.

One other aspects that spawned from the Calendar App/productivity system is tracking and managing how my time is spent online. In an effort to fight the powers of social media corporations and the “shiny” things they have all throughout their sites, I developed a small Google Chrome Extension that tracks time spent on specific sites and manages my access based on a time limit or a schedule. One major challenge with this was allowing access to specific subdomains of a site. For example, since a lot of my studying and learning takes place on YouTube, a certain level of access is still required. Creating this extension took quite a bit of learning since they are written in JavaScript and html, but the extension works and has since been implemented. This project helped me get more comfortable with these new languages and enforce some rules on myself to break bad habits - a double win.

A future iteration of this extension will be fully integrated with the Calendar app, allowing for rules to be enforced according to calendar events, and giving the user one place to review time-management metrics.

This project was scheduled to finish in the last week of Q1. As is typical with all my projects, the scope of this grew pretty significantly. The original plan was to build a simple 3D maze and have the player navigate through. The new skills that I would be learning were:

All the above were successfully completed but the biggest time-sink on this project was my new scope. When I started designing and building the maze, I quickly realized I was going to be spending many hours doing very monotonous work. There were some tools that I could use to make the work a bit faster, but this also came as a perfect opportunity to learn something scheduled for later in the year anyway - procedural generation. For those unaware, this just means that things are built through a set of rules in code, rather than building things manually. A maze is a perfect opportunity for this, because 1 - it requires a simple set of rules and 2 - every time the game is played, the maze will be different. This also lets me keep the “amount of data” small (i.e. less walls on the screen at one time). The result is a randomly generated maze that stretches infinitely and always centers itself around the player. In the second gif, you can see the maze re-generate as the player leaves the center, but keeping the blocks around the player the same so they don’t notice a shift in the walls of the maze.

The project that was the most fun this quarter was re-creating a viral mobile game from 2013, Flappy Bird. The new skills to be learned in this project were:

When I set out to start this project, my obsession with foxes of course led to my decision to replace the bird with a fox. And when I started searching for some free assets to use, I was pretty disappointed to see what was available. So… again… I decided to take on a lot more than originally planned and drew everything in the game by hand. On top of accomplishing the original goals, I was able to get a lot of practice in with drawing pixel art and crafting animations. It was also a great lesson in all the small less obvious details that go into designing a game since a lot of the things I spent hours drawing are pretty easily missed and sometimes never seen - but the measure of perfection is something going unnoticed, right?

I’m super proud of the result you see below, and I was very happy to see friends competing to get higher scores and truly enjoying the game.

A smaller accomplishment, but something worth noting, is the creation of a Milanote board. Milanote is a whiteboard/notetaking tool that is useful for managing a number of projects. Each project is a link to its own board with its own set of info, notes, pictures, etc. This board will act as the pipeline for all my projects from inception to creation. Below is a snapshot of the board right now, showing the future projects that I will be working in the near future, as well as a number of brainstormed ideas that I’d like to work in the future. This is also a collaborative space so anyone who wished to view/take part in some future projects should let me know.

There were two projects (Gummi Ship Clone and a Hotline Miami Clone) lined up for this quarter that I did not work on - while these have now fallen off the pipeline, they have been replaced by projects that focus on learn more applicable skills. I think there is room for improvement and I could have finished a few more projects to keep up with the number of released products, but I am making changes to my routines and plans to reach toward this goal.

July marks the start of a lot of change. One of the biggest lessons I’m taking away from the last quarter is that I needed to find a way to live on my own. Its something I’ve thought would be beneficial for me for years now, but I’ve never really had the opportunity or could afford to, especially in California. At least now, being able to move out of state, there might be better options elsewhere. So after some research, what I’ve found is that its actually so much cheaper to live out of the country… So the travel plans are back on!!! The intent is slightly different now. Originally, the plan was to hit a bunch of countries in a 9 month period - now the plan is to spend as long as a Visa will last me before moving to the next one. In September, I’ll fly to Japan for three months, and then from there I will likely go to Thailand for another three months. As mentioned earlier, this will come with its own unique set of challenges, but with some trial and error and a good level of discipline, I can make this a very productive AND enjoyable journey. Between now and then, I’ll be traveling around and staying with various friends to figure out what works best for me and this digital nomadic lifestyle I’m pursuing. Thanks ahead of time to all the friends opening up their homes to me.

From this point, I’ll mostly cover what the goals and plan are for the next month, maybe with an occasional reference to the longer term plan when there are shifts and changes to it. So for next month, lets cover the two focus areas again, Physical and Development.

The goal here is pretty much the same - continue building up with the workouts, continue rehabilitating the knee, and figure out a diet & exercise routine that works while on the move. Like last time, I’m going to use the same matrix I had planned on using - but with a little more runway to build up. I’ll be posting this in the next monthly newsletter, and with the more frequent occurrence, it should keep this at the forefront of my mind. Also, the first week of the month is already gone and most of that was dedicated to other priorities - so all my tracking will start with week 2 of the month.

This next month is going to be a pretty busy one. To start with, I’d like to track hours again like I did in Q1 - input goals are always better than output goals because they are much more within your control. Additionally, tracking hours helped encourage me to get more “Deep Work” sessions in (Deep Work as defined by Cal Newport. Great book, definitely recommend).

Some specific things that I’ll be working on this month are: