Gábor self reporting for 2021.11.08

This report is for October 2021 (See also the list of previous reports).

Overview

I am busy and I have been neglecting my monthly reports a bit.

I looked at Outreachy as I was thinking of building something similar, but with a more business-oriented aspects and without the requirement of people saying that Muslims face religious discriminated in France. There are plenty of other people who lack opportunities without such requirements.

When I am wonder where did my time escape in October it is good to look back and notice that I worked almost 100 hours for my client. I ran a 5-day online course at the Weizmann Institute (Programming Bootcamp) and we also had the first meeting of my weekly advanced Python course for Scientists at Weizmann. Apparently it is Ranked Eighth in the World for Scientific Performance. I think not bad. I hope some of my students could use what they learned in my classes to speed up their research and data analysis.

The first lesson of the advanced Python course was supposed to be a review of the language, but I figured it would be better to give people tasks. So I started to play with Exercism. I started to do the Python track, and also a few exercises in the Bash and in the Perl tracks just to see what's going on. I also wanted to be a bit involved in the development of Exercism and the exercises they have, but it seems to be too difficult to do so. I guess one needs to spend a lot more time on the platform and on doing small things till s/he slowly understand how things work and till maybe, the maintainers start to listen.

I also managed to read a few books this month. I read Minority Of One: The Unchaining Of An Arab Mind by Hussein Aboubakr Mansour and Jews Don't Count by David Baddiel.

All in all, after reviewing what I managed to this month I think I can be satisfied. I would want to do a lot more things, but well, one can't do everything and I certainly can do even less.

Personal blog posts

Only 2 posts on my personal site and one of them is the previous self-report. Not very active.

LinkedIn

Number of followers: 


  Hebrew:   623 (+1)
  English:  557 (-2)
  Spanish:   47 (-)
  Hungarian: 11 (-)

  Perl:    803 (+1)
  Python:  735 (+11)
  DevOps:  363 (-)
  Golang:  212 (-1)

  Personal: 4,261 (+11)

I hardly had any activity. Though I did run two fun polls.

Do you like responding to surveys?

Do you always tell the truth in surveys or do you always lie?

Twitter

Well, I have been watching Twitter a lot more this month that earlier. Started to follow a number of accounts that either declare themselves of Zionists or just are talking about Jewish identity. I also started to like and re-share many of their posts and even most some of my own content.

The number of my followers went down slightly, but as I can see the PerlWeekly account lost even more subscribers even though I have not posted there anything.

I primarily posted in my two main Twitter accounts.

Number of followers: 


  szabgab:      2,430 (-5)
  PerlWeekly:   2,788 (-7)
  PerlMaven:      581 (-)
  Code__Maven:     22 (-)

Patreon

Slowly I am loosing my Patrons. Probably due to the fact that I have not posted anything recently to Patreon and hardly posted anything on other platforms either. I should definitely start posting most content. Even if not specific to Patreon, but to my web sites and various social media channels.

  • 2021.10 ended with 54 Patrons and 7 followers
  • 2021.09 ended with 59 Patrons and 7 followers
  • 2021.07 ended with 61 Patrons and 7 followers
  • 2021.05 ended with 63 Patrons and 8 followers
  • 2021.04 ended with 62 Patrons and 8 followers
  • 2021.03 ended with 66 Patrons and 8 followers
  • 2021.02 ended with 66 Patrons and 8 followers
  • 2021.01 ended with 68 Patrons and 8 followers
  • 2020.12 ended with 66 Patrons and 8 followers
  • 2020.11 ended with 69 Patrons and 6 followers
  • 2020.10 ended with 66 Patrons and 6 followers
  • 2020.09 ended with 63 Patrons and 6 followers
  • 2020.08 ended with 54 Patrons and 6 followers.
  • 2020.07 ended with 30 Patrons

See a partial list of supporters.

Perl Maven

On the Perl Maven site there are 2 posts in October.

You can see them in the archive.

Code Maven

On the Code Maven site there are 2 post October (17 posts in June and 6 in July, 21 posts in May, 16 in April, 7 in March, 2 in February and 12, 2, 7, 13 in the previous months).

You can see them in the archive there.

Perl Weekly

In October I edited 2 of the issues and Manwar edited 2 issues of the Perl Weekly newsletter.

In October the subscriber count dropped bellow 5000. The first time since March 2014 when the number of subscribers crossed the 5K line on the way up.

YouTube

The number of followers on the various YouTube channels: 


  English:   2,350 (+24)
  Hebrew:      223 (+3)
  Spanish:      17 (-)
  Hungarian:    12 (-)

Webinars and Meetups

In these 2 months I had no webinar.

Live Pair programming

I had no events

These days I do a lot of pair programming with my clients so I have a lot less energy for doing public pair-programming sessions.

Spanish lessons

I only had a few lessons via Italki. I tried to have a few new conversation partners, but 2 of them were quite failures. Their Internet connection was really bad and somehow we could hardly find anything common to talk about. They were both new to italki, so maybe they will improve, but it did not give me a lot of good feelings. This was the first time I did not give people 5 stars.

Arabic lessons

Nope, I stopped that. I felt that the way Duolingo is teaching Arabic is not good for me and I did not have the energy and the motivation to find other sources of learning Arabic.

French lessons

On the other hand I started to take the French course on Duolingo. The primary motivation is that my long-term client is actually a subsidiary of a French company and due to recent changes I might have a lot of interaction with them in the coming months. I thought this might be a good opportunity to see if I can get along with this language. So far the spelling is really strange - though of course I knew that if possible they are worse than in English in not being phonetic. Spanish is so much easier in this regard.

Frankly, most likely I'll stop this side-track as well as I don't have that much of a motivation but it is sort-of a fun game.

Games

Playing lots of games on Dragon Go Server.

Sport

According to Runkeeper I went walking 20 times in October.

It seems the integration with Asics does not work very well. I am soooo tired of big corporations ruining good software services.

Hiking

If you are interested in the routes and the pictures here is the only hike I had in October:

See also my Hiking in Israel Meetup group.

TODO