Welcome to Bullets #22! Sit back, relax, and dive into the latest edition of the series, you can also catch up on the previous edition bullets/21.

The last few weeks are a little blurry — I had a bit more on my plate than usual.

Everything else#

  • Some time ago I wrote about a friend who’s been fighting cancer. I’m happy to report that he’s with us and was discharged from the hospital as a healthy person! I can’t even describe the emotions or the full story behind it, but the main thing is that M. is recovering and doing fine. That’s the best info of the year. Let’s all celebrate the small things and daily life with people next to us 💙
  • One day we went to the forest to look for mushrooms. We found just 7 — not much — but spending time among the trees was a great experience. It helped calm the thoughts and gave us quality time together as a family.

Work#

  • I was assigned to a new team (on top of the previous one) as we needed to speed up one project, and I joined as part of the reinforcements.
  • It was quite a disruption to my already established routine with projects and tasks, and involved more meetings and more time in parts of the application I hadn’t discovered before.
  • This type of change and additional pressure helped me appreciate the previous/normal state more :)
  • Boring is not always bad!

Sport#

  • This year I took part in a running Grand Prix in my county.
  • It consisted of 4 races located in my neighbourhood.
  • I did one 5k race and three 10k runs.
  • My best 10k time was ~48:20.
  • Next year I’d like to repeat the cycle, but this time I want to focus on 5k races and improve my PB (shouldn’t be that hard).
  • Races like this help me keep motivation for training going. It’s always fun, and getting the medal (and hot meal) after the finish feels nice!

On another note, my older son started attending football trainings for a local club.

  • It’s a bittersweet journey: sometimes he’s very happy because he scored a goal or did well during training; sometimes it’s quite the opposite when he’s not picked for the first team or not playing in his favourite position. I think it’s good for all of us as a lesson about how life generally is, but… it’s not easy 🙃
  • A cool part is that I have time to do my own training while my son is running after the ball.

Woodworking#

  • There hasn’t been much on this front since my unemployment period ended, but I’m in the middle of building some furniture — starting with a few cabinets — and the end goal is to create something bigger and finish the wardrobe.

Startups#

  • Our music startup didn’t get the funding we applied for, but…
  • We decided to continue anyway, added new members to our team, and we’re aiming to help music teachers get more students and make sure their lesson management and logistics are covered and smooth.
  • New code delivered in React — quite a journey for me. I miss the conventions I’m accustomed to from working with Rails, but on the other hand, I love that TypeScript gives me hints thanks to strong typing.

Music#

  • I just realized that ASOT gives people a way to attend the radio show and be there with Armin and Ruben during the show.
  • Back in the day, when I listened to ASOT regularly, it was around episode ~300 (now we’re at ~1250).
  • You had to download an MP3 and a .cue file, cut the big file into smaller pieces, add ID3v2 tags (I couldn’t just listen to a 2h long file called ASOT320 — I needed to know the exact names of songs). It was a mess, but we had this ritual of listening to it live on Thursday (?) and then replaying it over the next few days.
  • I like going back in time with my photos, so here you can see the room I lived in with two other colleagues and my battlestation from 2007. Great times!!
My battlestation ca. 2007. Multi-monitor setup, Herman Miller chair, dynamic lighting, powereful sound system and a multi-core beast as the heart of the system.

When it doesn’t feel worth it, take one small step anyway. The inner payoff shows up later. This post won’t turn the world upside down, but it helps me see what was and what will be a bit more clearly. Thanks for being here and see you soon!