Weekly update - 1 February 2016

The past week and a bit had two awesome weekends and not that much else. Work has been pretty standard, and planning around the snow proved interesting and fun.

Snow

The weekend before last saw record snowfall in Washington, D.C. and the surrounds. We got a little over 30 inches which is incredible. We went out and enjoyed the snow on the Saturday before the blizzard came in. It was knee deep and powder, we were loving life. This is definitely something I could get used to.

Snow 1 Snow 2

New York City

The last weekend we headed through to NYC. I wanted to go to meet the designer/seamstress for the clothing project I am working on, so thought we could make a weekend out of it. One of my favourite ways to see a city is to walk it, so we ended up doing around 30km over Saturday and Sunday. I opted to bring my new barefoot shoes, so my feet had a massive workout.

The meeting went well, and I’ll hopefully have a sample at the end of February. Other highlights of the trip:

  • Seeing Central Park covered in snow is magic.
  • Taking the ferry to Staten Island.
  • Meeting up with a friend I haven’t see in 7 years and was staying across the road from us.
  • Meeting up with another friend who lives in NYC, this time 4 years when we saw each other last.
  • Seeing the financial district again.
  • Walking half the island.

I’ll be doing another NYC trip to fetch the samples and chat more about the project, so will be reaching out to a few people to grab coffee and meet up.

My first trip to NYC left me feeling unimpressed with the city, but after spending more time there I’m starting to see its charm. It has a certain rawness that’s difficult to quantify but that makes it attractive.

Central Park NYC

Payments and banking project

I wrote a post on ideas around doing a payments project, and have since decided to focus on the banking project rather than split interests. I put in some time fixing UX issues and bugs, and the project is looking to pick up nicely again this week.

Misc

  • Decided to read two books per month, and ended up reading two books in the last week. I would recommend The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, great views on approaching life and only living with items that “spark joy”.
  • Didn’t get much studying done due to various factors. I’ll be sticking to the schedule religiously from here on out.
  • I’m in the process of rebooting ksred.co for possible web development work.
  • Related, found out how valued web development still is.
  • Related, I’m keen on learning more about design, both theoretical and practical.
  • Definitely starting to feel more at home in the USA.

Conclusion

I’ll be sure to stick to the weekly cycle as I’ve forgotten a few interesting items. The coming week includes studies, working on the UX and UI of the banking app and finding more books to read.