Lucky Day 13.

It is purely by accident that I found myself perusing the posts of this blog and finding the first post - first written on May 13, 2013. I am cheating a little bit because that May 2013 post was written for App Academy and they forced us to blog to Tumblr every day. To them, it was the best way for students to review and reflect on what they have learned.

Several of the students did not care much for the blogging and they treated it as a simple chore that they had to do before they went to bed. I started off the same way, but over time I found that I enjoyed the action of thinking back on time, ranting about things that were frustrating me, and what I was looking forward to on the next day. My blog posts became longer and longer (for many other people the opposite happened).

When I “graduated” from App Academy, I went on to join the labor force once more and found it hard to write as regularly. Though I still had the time - I wrote my posts on the train ride home from San Francisco - it just seemed that I did not have the energy to do it regularly again. The days seemed to blur together. I had defaulted to a position where I would write only when I felt that I had something to say.

Perhaps I am giving myself an excuse to not have to write a blog post - to prevent myself to having to do deep thinking about myself and my current situation. Reflection is the way through which we find ourselves more aware of our surroundings. Of the people who have deep impact on our lives and vice versa. Of the flaws and addictions that are afflicting us right now. These are little things, so little that they would be initially overlooked, but can be picked up when you are thinking to yourself about what you want to write about in today’s diary entry.

(Funny thing about this particular day, it always seems like the big, memorable events of my life happened on the 13th day of the month. Two of the biggest arguments I ever had with friends happened on the 13th. One of the hardest days I have had to go through in recent years happened on the 13th. Career-wise, whenever I am launching a campaign on Facebook, it seems like the 13th day is always the luckiest one for me to do it.)

Some Awards

What good point is there for a reflection post if there is no collection of winners and losers? It is like an awards show!

• Favorite post to write: The LASIK post was super fun because I got to go back and review all sorts of data and research. I also had a lot of fun finding the Interstellar gifs and using them in the post. And I think lastly, it is a question that I had gotten a lot of times so I was glad to go answer it.

• Most Valuable Post: The resume lookback post started off as a simple retrospective but ended up being the longest single post I ever wrote on this blog - over 9,000 words. It took about 2 weeks to write. More than just writing, I had to gather screenshots too and this complicated things. However the end result I think is a post that anyone can learn something from. It was just really interesting to look at the progression of the resumes from the very beginning (which was hopelessly amateur and had a header that said, “the short version”) to a much more honed, toned, and advanced version that anyone can be proud of.

• Least Valuable Post: Not sure why but I always felt that the review posts that I write turn out to be the ones I was least satisfied with. Not sure why. Just feels like that I did not do the original material proper justice. I am not a regular movie reviewer - I am a dude who likes to watch summer blockbuster movies and action flicks.

• Most Venting Post: The Four Hour iOS Bug post gave me the most release, naturally. While struggling with this bug to such an extent that I felt that I had wasted an entire weekend, it suddenly dawned me at the end of the ordeal (whereupon a two second change fixed the entire issue) that I could at least make do with the effort and write something out of it. I went into my Google web search history and ran with it. What started out as a quick 600 word post ballooned into something that ran over 4-5 pages. But I felt mighty good at the end of it and when I posted it.

Keep Writing? What About?

Obviously I am going to keep writing in this. I would like to get in about 1 post a week in the coming months. I find the rush of enjoyment that I get from pushing a new update to the blog very compelling.

The topics of this blog are going to vary as usual. Sometimes they are just going to be retrospectives on what I have been doing. Sometimes they are going to be educational - me trying to teach some sort of weird thing that probably nobody cares. Sometimes they are going to be movie reviews (and we know how useful we think that one is).

But I would like to keep writing. 2 years of blogging today. Here’s to few years more.