Monthly Review - January 2021

After a relaxing holidays, I’m back and at it in 2021! Since I formalized my goals for 2021, my monthly reviews will include goal tracking as well.

Goal Tracking

• 🟢 Get 1% faster. It’s only January, but I feel really good about this goal. The next couple months of training will be about rounding into shape by tweaking form and pushing my speed endurance. It should translate fairly easily into faster 100 and 200m times.
• 🟢 50% less discretionary spending. My discretionary spending in January was actually down 91% compared to 2020. I don’t think this is sustainable (in particular, restaurants reopening means my food spending will probably go up), but it’s a great start to the new year!
• 🔴 One hour of solitary free time a day. I’ve only come close to this goal on weekends. I haven’t done a good job prioritizing free time during the week.
• 🟢 Twice-weekly live conversations with friends. Somewhat surprisingly, I’m 4/4 in January! About half of these were serendipity—I’ll have to make my own serendipity and reach out more to keep this up in future months.

Track & Fitness

Training continues to go well despite the cold and rainy weather. I took the last week of January off because I’ve had some hamstring tendonitis. I still managed to hit a couple PRs:

• Freelap-timed 10.65 100m (video)! Assuming a normal reaction time, that’s about 10.80 FAT. Hopefully I can compete soon—I’m planning to be in Atlanta for most of the outdoor season, and it seems like the universities there are holding meets.
• 2.93 30 meter fly! My fly times continue to trend down. For comparison, in warm weather in August my best fly times couldn’t crack 3 seconds.
• 24 pullups! This is a small 2-rep PR from my previous best of 22 from last September.
• 200 pound OHP! A 10 pound PR over my best from last September.
• 290 pound bench! This is just a 5 pound PR over last September, and my 300lb attempt went even worse. I haven’t been super happy with my bench programming—I think I need to add more volume to continue to make progress.

Writing

• By the Numbers: My 2020
• 2021 Goals
• 63 Tips for Better Workplace Communication for Software Engineers
• Temperature And Speed
• Shared Vulnerability

Reading

I finally set up Goodreads! Here’s what I read this month:

• Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
• Managing Oneself
• Personality: What makes you the way you are
• Kluge
• Stumbling on Happiness

Projects

• reddit-readwise is a Cloudflare worker and iOS shortcut that facilitates uploading Reddit comments to Readwise.
• I set up email capture with ConvertKit on my blog (scroll down a bit to see the form). I’m not sure what I’ll do with it yet—what would you, dear reader, like me to email you about?

Links & Quotes

Software engineering/Startups

• Why does it take so long to build software? - Simple Thread
• Improving how we deploy GitHub - The GitHub Blog
• Make Boring Plans
• When costs are nonlinear, keep it small.
• Summit Your Goals – Boring Startup Stuff
• Avoiding Delegation Downfalls – Boring Startup Stuff
• Don’t delegate what you love doing. Delegate what supports you doing it.
• SOC2 compliance
• US Employer Guide to Hiring International Students
• What Silicon Valley “Gets” about Software Engineers that Traditional Companies Do Not - The Pragmatic Engineer

Track/Health

• Long-term HRV analysis shows stress reduction by magnesium intake - PubMed
• Utilizing the National Basketball Association’s COVID-19 restart “bubble” to uncover the impact of travel and circadian disruption on athletic performance | Scientific Reports
• Buttock Size Matters: Researchers Reveal a Large Gluteus Maximus Is Key for Sprint Speed and Performance | Loughborough University

Other

• Once we can see them, it’s too late
• Experienced well-being rises with income, even above $75,000 per year
• The T-Shaped Information Diet
• As birth rates fall, animals prowl in our abandoned ‘ghost villages’
• Hacking Habit Development
• The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class
• The 3-ladder system of social class in the U.S.
• Still Alive - Astral Codex Ten