Gábor self reporting for 2022.01.01

This report is for November-December 2021 (See also the list of previous reports). It also includes my New Year's resolution for 2022.

Overview

I was busy and I have been neglecting my monthly reports so this is a bi-monthly report.

In the last two month I spent an enormous time on the Advanced Python course I was teaching at the Weizmann Institute of Science. I had to prepare lots of material for the course that I thought the first time. I hope the students were satisfied. For next year, if we run the course again, I'll have to work even more to improve the course. Not only that I spent a lot of time on it, I also spent a lot of time agonizing that I should work on it and that stopped me from doing a lot of other things. This was not a good feeling.

I also spent a lot of time and energy on Twitter writing about Zionism, Anti-Zionism, and Anti-Semitism in general.

I managed to read a few books these months, so not all the time went to the advanced course.

I am currently reading

Oh yes and I started to learn Ladino and started to contribute to an open source project called LibreLingo. A lot of time went there too.

Personal blog posts

8 posts on my personal site not that bad.

LinkedIn

Number of followers:

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

Perl: 804 (+1) Python: 749 (+14) DevOps: 365 (+2) Golang: 213 (+1)

Personal: 4,276 (+15)

I hardly had any activity, but I helped my son to spread his posts a bit. That got quite some attention.

Twitter

I started following even more people in the Jewish/Zionist circles. Tried to contribute with likes, re-shares and occasional posts. I don't how much value is there in this. It is clear that I lost a number of my follower who apparently don't like to hear about these topics.

On the other hand the Twitter account of the Perl Weekly saw a slight increase in the number of followers even though I have not posted there anything. Maybe that's the secret.

I primarily posted in my two main Twitter accounts.

Number of followers:

szabgab: 2,419 (-11) PerlWeekly: 2,796 (+8) PerlMaven: 581 (-) Code__Maven: 22 (-)

Frankly, I don't know if there is really any use in participating in Twitter, I guess I'll have to ponder about this in a separate post.

Patreon

A sudden (small) increase in number of patrons. Thank you!

  • 2021.12 ended with 56 Patrons
  • 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 were 7 posts in November-December.

You can see them in the archive.

Code Maven

On the Code Maven site there were no posts in November-December.

You can see them in the archive there.

Perl Weekly

In November-December I edited 4 out of the 9 issues of the Perl Weekly newsletter.

YouTube

The number of followers on the various YouTube channels:

English: 2,390 (+40) Hebrew: 231 (+8) Spanish: 17 (-) Hungarian: 12 (-)

Funny they are growing even tough I only posted one or two videos.

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.

Italki sent me a report that I had 48 lessons by 16 different teachers.

French lessons

I stopped it. I don't have enough motivation for this.

Ladino lessons

I started to invest a lot of time and energy in Ladino aka. Judeo-Spanish. I started to watch courses on YouTube. I bought a book teaching it and a dictionary. I started to write a course for LibreLingo. (I also invested a few days of work creating tools for language editors of LibreLingo. There aren't many so it is primarily for myself now, but I hope that more people will pick up the project and start creating courses. Even if not, these tools will be useful for me and for others who might help me.)

I talked about Ladino and I got in contact with several central figures of the Ladino-speaking community. I still have a long way to go to actually start to speak, but I hope this investment will pay off.

Games

Still playing lots of games on Dragon Go Server.

Sport

According to Runkeeper I went walking 12 times in November and 9 times in December. I had a feeling that I am not doing enough sport. I think partially it is due to being winter and getting dark and coldish too soon in the afternoon.

Hiking

If you are interested in the routes and the pictures here are the hikes I did in November-December:

See also my Hiking in Israel Meetup group that I was mostly neglecting in the last two years.

TODO - New Year's resolution for 2022

I think I already wrote that I don't like New Year's resolutions. I noticed I change directions much more frequently than a year and like most people I'd abandon my New Year's resolution very soon. That's part of the reason I have this (almost) monthly reporting.

Nevertheless I do have some plans or at least hopes.

I hope that I'll be able to get the support from the real experts of Ladino to continue learning the language and to continue developing tools for people to learn the language. I also hope to be able to spend time speaking with many Ladino speakers around the world and to encourage other people to increase the communication among fellow members of the tribe.

Along the way I hope that the tools I help develop will be useful for other endangered languages as well.

While learning and practicing Ladino I will want to continue with the Modern Spanish as well to make sure I can separate the two.

Income-wise I hope I'll have clients throughout the year to the tune of 100 hours a month. That will allow me to earn enough money and to invest large amounts of my time in my hobbies which is writing articles about programming, teaching programming and the stuff around it, contributing to various open source projects, learning Spanish and Ladino and hiking.

I hope I'll be able to for even more hikes than in 2021 and to keep doing the sport I did.

International travel will depend a lot on the COVID situation that does not look very promising for 2022. So my hope is primarily that I'll be able to visit my mother a few times.

Happy New Year!