The last blog post took me very long to write, now I am trying the opposite, writing something fast. And that is something I want to do more. Because I want to document what I am doing. A bit like the "weeknotes" that some people write, but I know in my case it won't likely be exactly each week.

I want it to be a mixture of documenting what I have actually done — especially in terms of learning new things — and commenting on books, articles and current events as well as occasionally jotting down all kinds of thoughts. A lot is in flux, with my life (my work life much more than my family life, though I have to admit the children becoming teens has an impact!) and with society at large.

Plan till the end of the year

Learning new things and organising Codehub, these constitute my — unpaid — "job" at the moment, which I take seriously and so far have managed to treat as such. And the documenting, I'd like that to become part of the job, too.

Job description:

• Learn (and build)
• Organise CodeHub events
• Write about both

With learning my focus will be on:

• Python
• DevOps with Vagrant, Docker, Ansible; also simply learn more about Linux

I would like to carry on learning Haskell, but it will be difficult to invest a lot of time in it.

And these are currently my projects

1. The main one will be a Django app with the working title "Book exchange"
2. Build and manage "Codehub servers" where members can put projects up
3. Building a mini website for a friend of mine, with a CMS called Pico and text files managed via Github and prose.io
4. Trying some web scraping (shared interest with Lewis, who's in Malta)

I have decided that Mon, Tues, Wed I will each day do at least 4 full hours on Python, the app, or related DevOps. Thursday was going to be reserved for Haskell (but last week showed in practice this will be difficult), then Friday for reading, writing, communicating, philosophising. A day where I'd also purposefully allow myself to "drift off". - The minisite and web scraping I will do in other slots of time, late afternoon, evenings, weekend…

So I decided to set myself a minimal target per day, but then be rigorous about those 4 hours. Apparently you can not be very focused for more than 4 hours per day anyway. Still I will work for more on most days.

I will have to write about plans for Codehub organising another time.

One and a half weeks in

I'd also would have liked to write about what I have done so far! Maybe I will try a very brief summary:

• Set up a Vagrant and using Ansible installed relevant Python modules and Postgres on it, created Postgres db and user
• Then, for now, carried on manually with a Digital Ocean tutorial on setting up Django with Nginx and Gunicorn
• Started working through the Django tutorial
• Before all that, for my mini site, I worked out how to create a webhook from Github, so that on updating content via https://prose.io, a PHP script is run on the server to pull in the changes from the repo

This list is uncomplete. I am anyway pleased I got a fully functioning production server set up on my Vagrant, though I realise that this is doing things backwards. You can just start with using the development server — and I will use that to go through the tutorial. But somehow I wanted to solve the challenge of setting up a production environment first!

As so often when I start to write, there would be so much more. But at least I have made a start. I hope it is the start of things!

As to books, I am reading "The Guilty Feminist" by Deborah Frances-White at the moment. I have so much respect for her. Here is somebody who speaks her mind, and you can tell that it is simply what she thinks, and there's some really original thoughts in there that you would not hear from many other feminists. I also like her pointing out that the "calling out" and language-policing can quite quickly itself become dogmatic and then not much is gained. (She said this differently.)

The book and some of the thoughts in it is also something I will want to write more about!

For now good night, so late now, 4 am. Tomorrow is hack night…