Onoes! The New Blog Syndrome struck again! A month has passed without me updating. Cue the obligatory post about why this is happening! This post is also a random collection of thoughts of things going on right now. Because of reasons.
I’ve been out sick pretty much half of October. I don’t recommend it. I was one of the first to fall in the recent wave of late-fall colds, and in true man-with-a-cold fashion, I was practically entirely non-functional for the entire duration of my sickness. And of course, I returned to work too early, and I went bad once again and prolonged my sickness for another week.
2/10 should not do again
Whilst not sick, I’ve met some new people. Two of them, separately and on different occasions, asked me what country I was from! They could not believe I was from Sweden because I have such a heavy English accent and mix so much English into my casual speech. It’s actually difficult for me to put down into words how happy this makes me, but it do. I am very glad that I get to spend my days speaking English, and I have noted that every now and again, we converse in English in the apartment as well. Happi tears. <3
Anyway, while I was out cold (hehe) I decided to revamp my life a bit. I read a very interesting blog post about a guy that made at least one contribution to GitHub every day for almost half a year, pretty much solely by riding on the powers of habits. Since I am one of the least habitual people on the planet, I decided to try this and see if it would improve my habits.
So far, I’ve been doing it for 21 days (I started October 1st, so it’s pretty easy to remember). Thus far, it feels great! I am now everyday making the concious decision of not procrastinating and rather creating something. Not everything is a patch to a great and awesome Open Source project; updates to my own projects, configurations, and this very blog will count; but at least I am doing something every day.
Now that I have something that I do every day, I’ve scaled back on some other things I’ve been doing a lot; watching TV series. The fall season started recently, and some of my favorite series have begun airing new seasons. American Dad, Family Guy, How I Met Your Mother, Walking Dead, Elementary, Criminal Minds, etc. I feel like it is almost too many to count. So, I dropped all of them but one.
I’d love to watch every one of them, but I did a very short calculation about how many hours of my life I’ve spent watching these and other shows, and the result was… depressing to say the least. I’d so much rather create and code, since creating and coding always leaves me with a feeling of satisfaction.
One of the things giving me satisfaction right now is my insanely stupid doge project. I started it as part of my contribution streak, and I’ve been patching it pretty much every day since. At first the response of it was kind of lukewarm. Some people found it kind of giggly, but not much more than that. Then, this Saturday evening, it went viral on Twitter or something. I actually still don’t know what happened, but suddenly the Stars on GitHub tripled (and landed on 100 whilst writing this!), downloads on PyPi increased by over 2000, and I got multiple pull requests.
I was at a party during the time all of this happened, so I had no idea. When I woke up on Sunday morning with a giant hangover, I had more action on my GitHub then I’ve ever had. With the biggest smile on my face, I sat and merged commits others had written for my project, and I felt the glimmering shine of actual Open Source streaming out from my laptop screen. It made me genuinely happy, and I am still riding the good feels from it.
I noted that some of the people that starred the project and interacted on the pull requests are people from the community that I know and respect. This makes the fangirl in me squee my pants so hard it’s silly. <3
So all in all, even though I’ve been home sick for the better part of this month, it’s been a really good one. Another!
And yes, the title of this blog post will indeed be the title to the 9th book in the Game of Thrones series.