I’m in NYC for the next 3 months; I arrived at Newark on Friday at 5pm local time and have been pretty slammed since. I’m here for a few reasons, but specifically the reason for NYC is that I’m attending The Recurse Center (Fall 2 batch) to reboot my software development skills. After I left Amazon, I spent about 8 months supposedly doing that, but mostly what I was doing was purchasing online courses about how to be a web developer/etc and not completing them because they always started at way too basic a level. I also realized that I work better with others and that I was unlikely to ever make progress on my own. The Recurse Center is not a software developer bootcamp, but more of a programming ‘retreat’ where people go to become better programmers (and boy, did that stump the border guard). So I think the odds of me actually making progress here are much greater.

But that’s not the only reason I’m here. I’ve fallen into a lot of bad patterns and habits at home, health & well-being wise and the plan is for this to be a bit more of a traditional ‘retreat’ as well as a programming one. I have goals to meditate daily, eat vegetarian, exercise 5 times/week, stretch and roll out my bad muscles daily, and not drink any alcohol. I also plan to write and reflect a lot more. To that end, I’m spinning up two new sites (one is a relaunch of a sadly abandoned venture but I actually had it printed on business cards this time, so you KNOW it’ll happen 😉

I’ll be launching learnwithkara.com and beupstry.com next Monday.

LWK will be a journal and writeup of all the stuff I’m doing at the Recurse Center as well as a writeup of that site’s creation overall (unlike this & the other, I’ll be using a static site generator at first and then gradually migrating that to hand-coded). It’ll also include host any projects I actually manage to complete that are web-demoable.

The Beupstry will be, as originally intended, a place where I reflect on becoming a happier, better person and talk about the things I am learning about how to think differently, how to react differently, and listing the resources I have found helpful in doing that. It’ll probably be pretty heavy on lay-buddhism and self-awareness and self-compassion.

But right now, it’s 9:51 EDT and because I have to get up early and exercise before going to the RC, I am going to sign off now (as noted in this Beupstry v0.1 post, sleep is critical to mental and physical well-being). Have a fantastic day!