Blog posts
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House Dance Class (August 13, 2024) – Review and Reflection
Below is a short review and recap of Ani’s house dance class (beginner/intermediate) that takes place in London every Tuesday night at 6:00pm over at Pineapple Studio. Though I enjoy taking this class every Tuesday, this instance of the class was special because my friend Will (from Seattle, who was visiting London) joined me and…
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House Dance Class Recap – Review and Reflection
Class Details Location: Base Dance Studios (in London, by Vauxhall station)Date/Time: August 08, 2024 @ 5:30pm-6:55pm (85 minutes)Overall class difficulty: 5 out of 10Combo difficulty: 6 out of 10Freestyle exercise? Yes Overview This blog post serves multiple purposes. First, it helps me experience gratitude. Attending this class is one of the ways I squeeze in…
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Waves of Focus – POET compass
POET compass is a mnemonic that I learned about from the Waves of Focus online course and its a tool that’s designed for qualitatively assessing how well something (e.g. physical, digital) is organized. Note: I’m currently enrolled in Kourosh’s Waves of Focus program. It’s an online course focused on individuals with the wandering mind, helping…
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Mystique (family dog): 1 year remembrance
It’s been one year since you left us and moved on to doggy heaven. I miss you so much. I feel a bit guilty about forgetting the day of your passing and what sparked the memory was me scrolling through my YouTube video archive and noticed the title of the video: July 29, 2023 –…
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On practicing repair with my daughter
I value the act of repairing relationships after experiencing conflict, especially with my daughter. Repair as a concept was something I learned after stumbling on Dr. Becky Kennedy’s TED Talk titled “The most important parenting strategy.” The premise is simple: as parents we are imperfect (on the daily I practice unlearning perfectionism). And as imperfect…
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Stretch Therapy – Program 10 Recap (Day 76)
Date of stretch: July 31, 2024 Equipment used: slider for hamstring lunge, chair, wall, yoga block Total exercise duration: about 20 minutes Thoughts: Hands down my favorite program so far. Used to hate hamstring stretches. But now that I’m able to target the muscles without experiencing sciatic nerve pain behind my knees — thanks to…
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Practicing short and simple post – Recap of today
In many areas of my life, I am mindfully resisting perfection. Same applies to this blog post. Instead of another post sitting in DRAFT status, I’m going to publish a post with a few bullet points:
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Styling arms in house dance
This morning, I re-watched a video that I recorded the night before, while practicing dancing some house dance. And what stood out to me the most was not my footwork, but my arms. In particular, something seemed “off” about the positioning of my fingers as well as the angle in my arms. Given arms is…
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Receiving end of racism: distress tolerance (STOP) skill
It’s been a while since I experienced overt racism but today, while working remotely in the Morden Costa coffee shop, a man sitting a few tables away from me, shouted “Hey, CHINA man”, trying to get my attention. After I ignored him, he followed with shouting out a few expletives, then proceeded to step outside…
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Proud dad moment: Elliott blowing a bubble (gum)
Experiencing Joy and Pride Parenting philosophy Teaching emotions Spiritual Growth of Elliott
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Complimenting someone on their outfit and experiencing minor embarrassment
While sitting in a local cafe where I work remotely, sipping on my Earl Grey Tea with a splash of Soy milk and honey, I shifted my gaze away from my laptop and saw a woman standing outside, a person I had walked past by earlier. When I had first saw her, I thought to…
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90 days of blogging
Over the 90 days, I’m going and aim to blog little micro entries on this website. It’s okay if I break the chain. This will be a practice in discipline. I’ve been exchanging emails with Kit Laughlin, the pioneer behind Stretch Therapy. In addition to asking him (and his partner and co-owner of Stretch Therapy,…
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Stretch Journal – Monday July 01, 2024
I’ve entered the 6th week of my stretching journey. In today’s program (12), we focused on the following muscles: calves, quadriceps, and ankles. Throughout this journey, I’m semi-regularly tracking my progress because I have this vision — a very clear image (which almost brings me to tears thinking about it) — of me moving gracefully,…
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Short self analysis on house dance move: toe tap
I almost always post recap videos on Instagram after taking dance classes (of course unless the class does not permit or discourages filming). In addition to capturing, creating and posting these videos (that hopefully show the spirit of the class), I’ll sometimes review clips of me dancing in class, playing back certain moves that I…
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Sadness following receiving a hurtful Instagram comment
Yesterday I experienced a moment of sadness after reading a comment (see screenshot below) posted by (burner) Instagram account. I had thoughts that this person may be Jess (since I had blocked her account — along with her family — after she had repeatedly brought up my Instagram stories up during mediation and it was becoming…
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2023 – Brief Life Update
I haven’t posted on this blog for almost a year. And I miss writing. A lot. Interestingly enough, I observed that I stopped publishing my own writing when my attention and intention shifted towards growing an audience, when I had decided to “professionalize” my blog and create a funnel for business. A part of me…
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Stop being caught off guard: the art of setting software limits
Are you a software developer building scalable web services serving hundreds, thousands, or millions of users?
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Take the guessing game out of your metrics: publish counters with zero values
I remember designing a large-scale distributed system as an AWS software engineer. Amazon’s philosophy that “you build it, you own it” means that engineers must, at all times, understand how their underlying systems work. You’re expected to describe the behavior of your system and answer questions based on just a glance at your dashboards. Is…
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CloudWatch Metrics: Stop averaging,start percentiling
AWS CloudWatch is a corner service used by almost all AWS Service teams for monitoring and scaling software systems. Though it is a foundational software service that most businesses could benefit from, CloudWatch’s features are unintuitive and therefore often overlooked. Out of the box, CloudWatch offers users the ability to plot both standard infrastructure and…
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Dirt cheap, reliable cloud infrastructure: How to deploy a Python worker using Digital Ocean’s serverless app platform for $5.00 per month in less than 5 minutes
In this blog post, you’ll learn how to deploy Python based worker using Digital Ocean’s Cloud App Platform for only $5.00 per month — all in less than 5 minutes. Deploying a long running process Imagine you’re building an designing a distributed system and as part of that software architecture, you have a Linux process…
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Stop using keywords (or tags) like an archivist. Think like a writer
As part of your digital organization journey, you’re likely using a combination of two strategies to organize your digital database: Using folders/directories for imposing structure and creating well-defined categories Leveraging keywords to overcome the constraints of either-or categories. While choosing keywords may seem simple at first, it’s a skill that develops overtime and improves with…
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Burning fat with intermittent fasting? 3 weeks of monitoring body ketones
I began my intermittent fasting (i.e. time restricted eating) journey just over 3 weeks ago and since the beginning, I’ve been measuring, tracking, monitoring both my glucose and ketone body levels. Collecting these data points require pricking my fingers with a lancet and feeding small blood samples into the monitoring devices. Although the process of…