Week in Review 2023-10-24

Life keeps happening and I haven’t posted in some weeks. The latest update is a move, a move of apartment, not because we want, but because we have been asked to.

Turns out that given two year contracts for rent was not a good idea as the Netherlands government once thought. The idea behind was to reduce the risk for the home owners such that they would rent properties without risking entering into a permanent contract with a new tenant, kind of offering a two year trail before getting into the permanent one. However, that has evolved, and in the current market the landlords do not want to extend contracts, as it is not financially viable for them, as per getting into a permanent contract means that the yearly increased gets indexed, and they can no longer charge what they want for the apartments. Anyhow, we experience the Netherlands housing crisis, fortunately we have a new place to move in, and during the last weeks we have been preparing for the move to happen this Friday 😱.

The other big update is that we ran our first half marathon, together with friends we ran last Sunday through Amsterdam streets. It was a nice race, and a new way to enjoy the city. During the training I thought of writing something about running and cities (will definitely do it), as there’s something unique on how one gets to experience the city while running it’s streets, if training felt that way, the day of the race felt even better. To see so many people running in the street, and more people cheering on those running was really something. I had a feeling of belonging to a city while people were cheering, community I believe it’s called. I’ll definitely keep running and enjoying being out discovering new streets, parks and routes.

On the professional side during the last month I spent some time working on the business side rather than on the technical one, it was interesting to get back to the drafting of proposals, and thinking about the work that can be done, rather than making such work. I enjoy working on a start-up and having the opportunity to jump between areas, it reminds me of the days when I was running my own office. I really like that feeling. Lately I came back to more technical work, it’s always good to get back to the code.

Finally, during some months already, I have been playing around with py5, a Python version of Processing for 2D and 3D drawing, it has been my go to side project for channel my inner creativity with code. The following is an example of the creative coding pieces I have been working, a system that divides the space vertically, then randomly assign some point in the x coordinates, and draw lines between the (x, y) coordinate and every point in the bellow y space, then repeats for every partition in the vertical side. A simple algorithm to make a drawing based on certain rules. The code is available in my github.