Will Forbes

Blog #6: Life Update

—

by

Will Forbes
in

Whether we’ve already met and you’ve known me throughout years, or you’re a new visitor into my life – I’m glad you’re here. Let me get you caught up on what’s been going on. I turned 33 this year and despite the state of the world – things have been going well in my realm. For the last few years I’ve been on a self-improvement kick and it’s paying off. So much so that I’ve felt inclined to regularly share what I can and offering up some goodness to whoever happens to visit this site.

Life Update

For the last two years, I’ve been working as a programmer, making a great living wage. I’ve been attending a decent online university to finish my bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. I’m living with my girlfriend in a nice house we started renting back in August. We’ve been together for a year now. I keep myself busy with projects, hobbies, and as many adventures as I can. To say I’m lucky and blessed is an understatement because despite my schedule I can still get some time to skateboard at the local skate parks. I can jam out on my guitar writing music a little bit. I play video games lightly and have fun writing code on the best computer I’ve ever owned in my life.

So with as happy and fulfilled as I’ve been feeling right now, I also really feel the need to share what I’ve been doing in order to have such a good life. Not too long ago my life was far less enjoyable and I didn’t have nearly as much as I do now. The path between there and here was a rocky one, but I’m hoping that if I keep up my recent efforts I can show others what they could do to get into a better living situation. I’m not sure if blogging is the way to do that, but writing this way publicly seems like a good habit to try to continue.

Getting Covid-19

The year came and went with, what seemed like, the whole world struggling to deal with the Coronavirus. Between infection rates spiking and getting shifted to mandatory work-from-home status a couple of times, I felt really lucky to not have been infected. I spent all year being fairly healthy and well, at least until this month! Around the beginning of December, my girlfriend’s daughter brought home the virus. Even though she tested negative for it and her symptoms cleared up quickly, the whole house came down with something so we decided to get tested for the virus too. Sure enough, we tested positive. Thankfully, we didn’t need any drastic treatment and we didn’t get hit hard with it. I had a set of symptoms that progressed between a few different phases. A fever for a few days that reached the low 100s Fahrenheit, a strong migraine that had me in bed for a day, a sore throat that lasted for another day or two, and then lingering fatigue that forced me to take regular long naps for a couple of weeks. All throughout, I had a dry cough. That’s about it. Now 22 days later I feel 100% my normal self. I could definitely tell that if I was in worse health or had some other pre-existing condition this thing would have been a nightmare, but I lucked out.

New Daily Tasks To Do Throughout Next Year

I’ve got a lot of projects I’ve been working on and dabbling with. For at least a few years now I’ve been REALLY trying to stay busy and focused on being ‘productive’. To be honest, I’ve been kind of a maniac. I got a taste of serious progress in my life and I’m hungry for more. Chomping at the bit.

Last year around this time I posted some blogs with the same thought of continuing to post them monthly. I wrote about all the stuff I’d been working on, all the stuff I wanted to get done in 2020, and a bit about organizing/planning all of it. I wanted to read books often, dive deep into my skills and hobbies, and write tons of descriptions and reports on all of it. Yeah, that didn’t continue for long.

I definitely read a lot and work on a lot of projects, but I didn’t keep up with the blog habit because a monthly blog had me wanting to write these long in-depth essays and interesting focused studies on academic or intellectual topics that… really… no one is going to read. I mean even this relatively short blog post here that you’re reading now isn’t going to get very many eyes. If any at all!

So I’m taking a different posture this year. Short, simple, easy blog posts as often as I can. That’s the way to go. Not long, wordy, complex ramblings every month. I’ll resist diving down insane rabbit holes trying to craft literary masterpieces. Just keep it to more of a journal that people are free to read and browse if they want. That just makes more sense.

Overall, I’m happy with my progress. I want to keep that progress up, focus on simplicity over complexity, and organize my tasks. I have a list of stuff I’m going to work on a little bit at a time every day and I’m going to use Task-Tracking/To-do list apps to organize my efforts. Earlier in the year I listened to Atomic Habits by James Clear on Audiobook and took away quite a few useful lessons. One main one is that building up, continuing with, and succeeding in any new habit or skill is dependent on little changes. Small, simple, bite-sized, shifts in behavior. This sounds easy but the key is CONSISTENCY. Consistently, day-in and day-out, doing what you plan to do, especially when you don’t feel like it, is the secret to monumental success.

So, I pulled up the first to-do list app I’m going to try using and made a to-do list. I went with todoist.com and so far I like their interface. A few of the features don’t work unless you pay their monthly subscription of $4.00, but with the many free features I’ve been able to get started. I don’t think the premium features (like comments, reminders, templates, trends, etc.) are required for me right now, so that’s nice. Here’s my little task for writing this blog post:

You can add sub-tasks to a task, which I find handy. Mark them off as you go, and soon enough you’re on to the next task. Tasks can be set up to be recurring, like daily, weekly, monthly, etc. or they can be scheduled for a specific day. I’m setting up my daily tasks I’d like to work on everyday:

Clean and Organize

So first, I want to make sure my work space and my house are clean. It’s easy to get in lazy habits of leaving stuff out and letting clutter build up – especially when you work from home like I do. I added those tasks to just make sure that’s a first priority when I’m getting started for the day.

Create a blog entry

Like I said, I want to make this a daily habit. It serves a few important purposes. It will force me to do something at least slightly notable, practice writing something coherent about it, and get me started with adding content to this website you see here. When I’m networking with people professionally and I tell them my website address, or when they see it on my linked-in profile, they won’t end up landing on an empty website… at the very least they’ll see what I’m working on and they’ll see I can keep up a good habit. With any luck all the practice will improve my writing skills, and with even more luck – all this might actually make me look like someone worth keeping in contact with!

‘Omnia’ RPG and Levelz.app

If you hadn’t noticed by now, I’m a programmer. To keep my skills and continue getting better, I’ve got to write code every day and practice new techniques. What better way to do that than with fun projects that I’m personally interested in?

Omnia RPG is a video game I started making years ago, but haven’t worked on much at all until just very recently. It’s a simple ‘retro’ game in the style of early 1990s 2-dimensional pixel graphics games like Super Mario, Zelda, Metroid, or Castlevania. I didn’t use any pre-made engine and opted to code my own simple game engine to run it. My focus is to practice and study my code skills, have fun, and create something others find fun.

Levelz is a website I’ve been working on. It’s very similar to task-tracking/to-do list websites like todoist.com but with a twist. I’d like to turn it into a bit of a video game. I figured that since video games can be so fun and addictive, there’s no reason that planning and getting things done in your real-life shouldn’t be just as addictive… if not more! I’ll be using this site as my final senior project for my bachelor’s degree program, but I’d like it to be as useful and fun as possible – so that I can use it every day myself.

Both these projects aren’t very far along, but that’s all the more reason to work on them consistently everyday.

Study/Practice C++ and Calculus

C++ is one of the most popular and widely used programming languages on earth. It’s a no brainer that I’d be learning and studying it everyday. I’m enrolled in a Calculus class at school, so I’ll be working on that everyday too. I have a few textbooks for each of these subjects that I’ve been using and I recommend:

Beginning C++17 ; Effective Modern C++ ; C++ Concurrency ; Mastering C++

Calculus 10th edition ; Calculus 5th edition (intl. version) ; The Humongous Book of Calculus Problems

Read books from my reading list

Reading for fun has always been a habit I struggled to keep up. Listening to audiobooks the last few years has been a great way to get started, but I know that actually reading a physical copy will help immerse me more deeply. I’ve got a couple of shelves of books behind me here in my office just waiting. Some I’ve already read.. others I’ve only paged through randomly.. and many that I haven’t even really opened yet. By the end of 2021, I want to have finished a sizable portion of them. Here are my lists (books not in order):

Non-Fiction
Fiction

I also want to devote time to learning how to fly freestyle FPV drones, drawing, playing guitar and other fun stuff. Like I said, I think that making sure I do it a little bit everyday is the key.

That’s it

Beyond all else, I just want to thank everyone that’s stayed in my life or has been in my life throughout the years because you helped me get to where I am now. I’m thankful and ready to share more of my life, give back to others, and keep exploring this wild world. Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more.

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *