Becoming a Father

In 2020, I started a new adventure called fatherhood. Amongst all the craziness of a global pandemic, wonderful and beautiful things are still happening. It’s been almost 5 months since my daughter Clara was born and every day is special, watching her make leaps and discover new things. It’s hard to imagine a world without her in it.

There isn’t much to compare it with besides having to deal with an extreme emotional ride on a daily basis. Extreme pain, as she cries trying to express herself, or extreme happiness as she smiles at you and you know she loves you.

One thing that surprised me was how you suddenly add a premium to your free time. The scarcity of an alone moment forces it. Your free time is now filled with play, diaper changing and acting as the official carrier of the new princess in town urging you to help her move from one room to another.

Every nap becomes a short reprieve to pursue your hobbies and personal entertainment before your are back to parent duty. You become a master scheduler by necessity. My empathy for single parents has grown immensely. I’m so thankful my wife and I have each other to help support one another.

I paint a bleak picture, but in reality there is more joy than anger and I’m so looking forward to getting to know the person she becomes and spending time with the person she already is. Love you Clara! From Dad. :)

The state of version control

Performance wise I’m pretty neutral when it comes to using either of the two major version control system (Subversion & Git).  The main difference is that Git is decentralized, but either can do the job well.  However; where Git wins for me is in the developer community and adoptions.   Github has made versioning social.   This is HUGE when you think about what this means for opensource projects.   The network effect will apply.

I follow the principle of DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) in software development and in life.   When I’m coding or try to solve a problem I’m now able to see if people have gone before me and already solved it or built something that I can re-use.

One way to see the adoption is with Stack Share:

SVN has only 87 stacks ( https://stackshare.io/search/q=svn ) using it, at the time of writing this.

VS

GIT with over 3549 stacks ( https://stackshare.io/search/q=git )  in use.

Granted stackshare.io is not in any way an academic way of doing a comparison.  It is only one indicator of many you should use when making a decision which versioning system to use.

Some other great resources:

GitHub Flow: https://guides.github.com/introduction/flow/
Semantic Versioning: https://semver.org/
Git Resources from GitHub competitor: https://www.atlassian.com/git

 

 

 

 

Practicing Meditation

Over the last couple years, I’ve become increasingly fascinated by meditation and it’s various forms.  I’ve started meditating in the morning and evening for 5 minutes as part of my daily routine and I’m seeing compounding effects even with such a small time investment.

My reasons for starting are pretty normal for someone working in technology and always on a computer.   I was looking for a way to destress and handle more inbound with patience, grace, and focus.  Meditation gives me a larger threshold and allows me to handle more while staying cool through whatever life throws my way.

The research on meditation is starting to improve and shows a lot of positive benefits such as improved attention, calmness, flow, increased happiness and even slowing aging.

I’ve used some of the more popular apps in the past like Headspace and Aura, but right now I’m mainly using Oak, which was a project from Kevin Rose that is gaining popularity.

All in all, there is a lot more research to be done before we will fully understand all the effects of meditating.  For me, the positive benefits are worth the investment of time and if you’ve never tried it for yourself I would encourage you to download an app and give it a shot.