The summer has been great this year here in Vancouver. We got a few weeks in a row of sunny weather with temperatures around 25 Celsius so we were able to enjoy the outdoors a lot.

Travel

The last big trip was the Dubai trip in May. We stayed 8 nights there and we enjoyed a lot. It is a very interesting place. You can check more details in the post The Best of Dubai and Dubai Desert Safari

But we have been around a lot in BC. We have been to many lakes and we even camped a few days. The last one was the last long weekend which we went to Chilliwack and Cultus Lake. We also did the Lindeman Lake hike and saw the beautiful lake.

Self Improvement

I am very lazy about my guitar learning and haven’t touched it in a few weeks. Until now I just know how to play some very basic riffs and I still have no finger coordination. I want to dedicate a bit more to this activity.

I am slow on podcasts this year as I started to go for some of my walks without a phone and headphones, just enjoying nature.

Health

I have improved my health indicators a lot this year. I have lost around 12 kg this year and more recently I even started doing strength exercises, the one thing which I didn’t like doing before. I even created and posted My Pillars of Health here in the blog.

Reading

After reading 23 books last year (check the best 5 books read in 2023 post here) I’m taking it slower this year.

The last one I read was The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self written by Michael Easter which I enjoyed.

Professionally, the last book that I read was Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems written by Martin Kleppmann and I am currently not reading any other.

Hobbies

My building has some garden spots and I rented one and the project is going great. We already harvested almost a bit of everything. The sunflowers are flowering now and the flowers are very beautiful.

I also started to pay more attention to birds. I will not say I am birding, but I have downloaded an app to identify them and I am paying more attention to looking for them and listening to their songs.

Professional

At work, as I work on the Platform Team, I am doing the Migration of Spring Boot from 2.7 to 3.2 and with it the Migrating Spring Sleuth to Micrometer Observability in Spring Boot 3 and also working on improving some parts of the system like the Migration from Netflix Zuul to Spring Cloud Gateway Server MVC. It has been fun and challenging to upgrade and with it, learn how things really work and also started to write small troubleshooting stories under the tag Tales of Staff Engineering.

Cheers!

(This is a now page, and if you have your own website, you should make one, too.)