Work
It’s been two months now since I’ve started worked full-time in another place while also supporting and continuing to build shipit. Having a new job is already stressful enough, but having two jobs in addition to a family with two children is… Well, it’s really hard.
On my new job I’m learning a completely tech stack on top of a fairly complicated business logic. The last time I felt useless like that was about 8 or so years ago when I joined another startup and just moved from developing small websites in PHP to working on a big monolith in Python.
It’s a really weird feeling when you have a lot of experience, yet you cannot apply it until after several months when you get more or less used to the code base, the bussiness logic, and the company processes.
New job has however had a positive impact on my mental health. I go to the office 2-3 times a week where I have small talk with colleagues over a cup of tea or coffee. We have winter swimming club. Sometimes I take public transport, sometimes I just walk all while listening to audio books. I missed such moments where I could walk to the office and listen to a nice book or an interview. Or nothing at all. It’s a moment to be with myself.
RC car
There isn’t much to write about it, but after a long wait I have finally received new motors which are slightly thinner, so hopefully I will be able to fit them on the chassis. I created 3D models for the couplings, and will get the printed parts in a few days.
Reading
I finished reading two books in November: The Greatest Story Ever Told by Lawrence Krauss, and Wildcrafted Fermentation by Pascal Baudar.
Foraging and fermentation have been my small hobbies over many years, and one day on the forum I saw a post about fermented nut cheeses. This got me interested, and I started reading Pascal’s book which culminated in me making sauerkraut. I did a small batch to give it a try. It was amazing. Now that it worked, I’m planning on doing a much bigger batch to keep us equipped with vitamin C throughout the whole winter.
As for Lawrence’s book, I won’t go into details here as I’ve yet to write a separate post about it, but it’s been mind-blowing. It’s a story on the biggest scientific discoveries in the past three centuries culminating with the discovery of Higg’s boson.
Reading “The Greatest Story Ever Told” was a very slow process, and I’ve restarted from the beggining after having read more than half of the book. During my first run I didn’t take any notes, and by the time I was moving to the next chapter I already forgot what I read before. This time I took notes of interesting places and concepts. Almost every page took me on a Wikipedia journey where I had to read about many new concepts in order to understand what the author was telling me. In the end there were still a lot of theories that I couldn’t understand, but the book made me a lot more interested in physics and also up to speed on the latest discoveries.
Winter swimming
It’s really weird, but I don’t like to swim in the warm water. I rarely go to the swimming pool, and during the summer I prefer to swim in the river when we go to our grandma’s summer house. It’s a different story in winter. I love swimming in the icy water. And November is when the season starts. I went swimming every week of the months thanks to a lot of my new colleagues doing the same.