With July coming to an end, we’re well into the second half of the year. Time flies. This newsletter’s a bit of a last minute one - I spent today out on a hike in Niigata. It was pretty hot! But a nice way to kick off the new month, and you can look forward to the blog post for that coming next weekend ✨
What’s new on the blog?
This month, I wrote:
About my camera setup with my Fujifilm X-T5. I did a couple of “iPhone vs Fujifilm” photo comparisons since before buying the camera this is what I was most curious about
Two posts about my hikes in July to Mt Jonen and Mt Makihata
A throw-back to a 2023 hike I did up Mt Yake
Working on Hardcover
I joined the Hardcover team as a part-time dev last month, so in July I spent quite a bit of my free time working on it. I’ve been mostly shipping a lot of little bug fixes, as well as fixing their search page which was kind of broken.
Even though I do a lot of programming at my full-time job as well, the programming I do at Hardcover feels a lot more fun, and not like a job at all. I was trying to think about why that might be, and I think I’ve settled on the fact that there’s a lot of autonomy at the moment. I’m free to pick up whatever bug I feel like working on, so everything I work on is something I’m actually interested in. Of course, this isn’t necessarily a good thing for Hardcover - you kind of want your devs to be fixing the highest priority bugs rather than random ones - so I do think there will be a bit more of a cohesive strategy coming at some point, but for now this works for me!
July in numbers
This month’s newsletter is a bit of a brief one 😅 so lets round things off with some stats:
🏋️♀️ 3 visits to the gym
🏃♀️ Ran 50km and hiked 26km
🇯🇵 Wanikani Level 44 (no progression)
🇨🇳 Pimsleur Mandarin Lesson 74 (no progression)
I chose this month to re-do some of the earlier Pimsleur lessons and some flashcards, so it wasn’t completely 0 progression, but not great!
🇨🇳 HanziHero Level 2 (no progression)
📚 Read 1 book
📝 Published 4 blog posts
💻 89 hours on Hardcover
I spent a lot of time on Hardcover in July, mostly to the detriment of language learning. Actually, it’s interesting to see just how much free time I actually had, that I’m able to spend this much time on Hardcover. It’s just really addicting!
I know I should do it less, and spend more time on other things, but I’m pretty bad at balance. When I tend to focus on something, I focus on it a lot. I’ve always been that way (playing 50 hours a week of video games back in high school comes to mind), so it’s kind of a difficult personality trait to change.
I also have managed to get back into running. I had some longer hikes planned in August (although it looks like next week’s hike might get rained out 😭) so it’s a bit of a last minute effort to get my cardio up.
See you next month!