2023-04-01
Update from April 1st, 2023
It’s been a while! (again…)
Oh well, so much has happened since the last time I wrote here.
Changing career
At the end of October 2022, I’ve decided to change career completely. At the young age of 42, that is. I’ve been working on myself a lot, and that helped me understanding that really, I need a change and I need to do what I feel it’s more relevant to me. And also that I’m truly passionate about and, most of all, that is aligned to my values. Most of all I don’t want to have anything to do with the advertising industry ever again, in any form or flavour. I guess I’m burned out after about about 12 years of grinding keyframes but also I have various ethical and ideological reasons I could talk about. But I’ll spare you the discussion for the time being. I really want to build stuff that people would actually use and find useful, that’s my main motivation right now.
And so I started as a half joke but I ended up studying full time HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The HTML/CSS part was easy enough as I wasn’t completely new to the languages. Although it would be hard to master. Then I dived into JavaScript (and into programming in general). That wasn’t a joke at all… It took me a few months of hard work but the 25th of March I got my freeCodeCamp JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures certification, finally! Honestly one of the hardest achievements in my life. And this is definitely just the start…
My motion design skills are not going to disappear over night, so probably I’ll find a way to converge the two skillsets at some point. For now I need to go all in the developer way of life. I’m aiming to become a proper Front End developer. Wish me luck because I really need it.
By the way, I’ve also enrolled at Harvard’s famous computer science program called CS50. It’ll be a walk in the park I’m sure.
Mastodon
In October Elon Musk had to finalise his deal with Twitter and bought it for good. It resulted in an exodus of people from Twitter to Mastodon.
And so the server I’ve been administrating for fun for the last few years became kind of my (unpaid) full time job for a few weeks. It was great to see so many people interested in Mastodon and mograph.social finally!
I had some hectic days (and nights) in which I had to deal with something like a new account request every 30 seconds! Also I had to set up all the proper donation systems, upgrade the server’s resources, write a proper code of conduct and more specific rules…a lot of work! As of right now the storm has definitely calmed down, but a few people are happily hanging out on mograph.social and I’m so proud, honestly. Also, a few generous folks chipped in the various donations’ systems and as of now the server is financially self-sustainable.
I love the Mastodon community!
GNU Linux
And since I’m finally free from that pile of burning trash that is the Adobe suite and I’m not forced to use that mass of spying clunky software that is Windows anymore I got back full time into another one of my passions which is GNU Linux!
I did a looong journey since last December, on several machines:
Ubuntu –> Pop_OS! –> Regolith –> Manjaro –> I use Arch, by the way. With i3. Yeah, I know.
This wasn’t all just for fun (oh well maybe), I’ve been learning to set up my machines for development as well. I’ve also uploaded my dotfiles on GitHub, if anyone wants to have a look at my customisations!
I also embraced the way of Vim and made my own custom configuration of Neovim, which I love to use for anything now.
Listening
Since now most of the time I’m busy either studying (reading, watching tutorials) or coding I have less time for active listening and new music discovery, unfortunately. And so not much new music for me recently, I guess I’m enjoying the records and bands I’ve discovered in the last couple of years for now. Anyway, I keep track of all my monthly listening here.
Reading
To be honest I’ve been mostly reading about programming and computer science recently. As for fiction I’m halfway through Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers. It’s the novel that Tarkovsky used as a base for its famous movie Stalker. So far so good.
Watching
We’ve been watching quite a few TV shows: The Last of Us was a good one recently (although that ending…), The Handmaid’s Tale I really liked as well. But the most intriguing one has definitely been Severance. Just not to miss the office that much. Right now we’re watching Succession; usually not my genre of TV shows but I have to admit it’s pretty well written and directed so far.
In terms of actual movies the very highlights have been Hot Fuzz (so much (British) fun!) and probably Her. I needed to watch it considered the actual AI progresses and constant news. I really liked Phoenix performance, and the visuals were quite good actually. I loved the weird futuristic LA mixed up with some Asian metropolis. I couldn’t believe the movie was made in 2013, it definitely aged well both visually and conceptually.
And that’s it for now, until the next time.
