Wazzaaaaaaa! January is over! Can you believe it? Already!? I hope you’ve had an awesome start of the year and if not, there’s 11 months left to straight thy course.

And here goes a tip/habit/practice to help you with that.

The Daily Reflection Habit

If I could choose one and only one habit to improve my life. That habit would definitely be working out.

But a close second would be the habit of daily reflection. When there’s no reflection, no deliberate thought there is no freaking opportunity for growth and learning.

That’s why every night before I go to bed I try to go through a process of looking back at my day and ponder on how it went. I grab my digital notebook and answer these questions:

• What are 3 things that went well today and that I’d like to repeat?
• What are 3 things that did not go so well and I’d like to improve?
• What am I going to do improve?
• Did I help anyone today?
• What am I grateful for today?

Some days are more remarkable than others but you’ll be surprised at how many things you can write about in the course of a single day. And sometimes there are outliers that help you known yourself better:

• When there’s been a situation that I’ve handled poorly I go through it in my mind and dissect it. Why did I react or behave the way I did? What should I have done instead? I try to retread and relive the situation in my head but this time I correct my behavior. Next time that a similar situation occurs, I’ll know what to do.
• When there’s a situation that I’ve handled awesomely or something that has filled with joy and happiness I follow a similar process. Why did I behave in this awesome way? What can I do to be more like this? Or have more of this joy and happiness in my life?

I don’t always have time for this somewhat involved process of reflection. In those specially though days when there doesn’t seem to be any time left for anything else that reactive survival I’ll do a compressed version of the daily reflection. Just before going to sleep I’ll replay the highlights of the day in my head (and oftentimes I’ll fall asleep while I’m doing this).

Try it out and let me know how it goes. I hope it’ll be as helpful to you as it’s been to me.

Wizards Use Vim

Last (last) weekend I was supposed to take part in the global game jam but my partner in crime had to cancel and so I chose to write instead. I’ve found that from time to time, it is nice to kick into high gear and do a small writing (coding) marathon to push my side-projects forward. It can be a little bit rough but I really like how much I can get done after one or two days of intense focus. These marathons are particularly helpful when you’re working on that last 20% that never seems to end, when you feel stuck and like you’re going nowhere.

I wrote a somewhat detailed update on how it’s been going with Wizards Use Vim and how the book is slowly taking shape. This is the intro to the book. I thing it’s getting there:

Hot This Week

Hot Interesting Reads

• Log points on Chrome Dev Tools: This new feature in Chrome Dev tools is going to remove your need to clutter your codebase with console.log.
• An epic hack to adjust your desk’s height with the Google Assistant
• A great article on optimizing the load speed of your website using Chrome Dev Tools.
• Dan Abramov is going berserk writing awesome article after awesome article at his new blog. This week he released a great deep dive into React: React as a UI runtime

Hot Stuff To Listen To

• This week I thoroughly enjoyed listening to some episodes from the Real Talk JavaScript show:
  • Productive Code Reviews with Chris Fritz pretty much is the article I’ve always wanted to write about awesome code reviews but I never did.
  • Building Code Sandbox with Ives Van Horn was a very interesting inside look at how he and his team built Code Sandbox (If you aren’t familiar with it, Code Sandbox is an advanced interactive web based playground that lets you experiment building React, Angular, Vue apps, etc, etc. And definitely check it out, great for experimenting, training, etc).
  • React Style Guides with Sara Vieira was both interesting and extremely hilarious
• Dev.to review is back after Christmas vacation! Yey!!

Hot Things to Watch

• The Google Chrome developers channel is really good. Fun fact. I had no idea it existed before I joined Google. (I used to live veeeery deep inside the Microsoft .NET bubble before. Yep. I even owned a Windows Phone for a long time.) There’s a loooot of different series going on in this channel and videos from cool webby events like Chrome Dev Summit, but this time I wanted to highlight a couple of them which are very short, and very informative:
  • First goes What’s new in Chrome dev tools?. This is a show that brings you the news on Chrome Dev Tools. It’s extremely short and concise, and I assure you it’ll improve your development workflow. An example you say? In the last video they share great tips about new performance metrics available right within the timeline tool,
  • What’s new in Chrome? follows a similar format to the one above but in regards to new browser APIs and JavaScript features.
• A cool webVR course by Mozilla in under 1 hour
• For my Spanish speaking readers out there, PerfReviews is a great new YouTube channel where José and Joan guide you through a performance review of popular websites. Check it out!
• Final Space. Epic Show.

That’s all for this week. Take care!

P.S. Sorry for the delay this week! I was ambushed by a band of Gnolls and just barely managed to escape with my skin intact.