So this is a new thing I'm trying out, a monthly public review where I talk about the month gone by on a personal level. I stole this idea from Belle Beth Cooper so credit to her for that!

What did I complete that I am proud of in August?

I've been leading a large module restructure of VideoScribe this month, it's not complete but many of the stories are, and that I'm really proud of.

I also did some teaching this month! I lead a morning session for CodingBug's Summer of Code 2015 and it was great! I showed a class of kids from years 7-9 how to use Stencyl to create small 2D games. They seemed to really enjoy it, I see some real talent there and one day I'm sure they'll take my job!

What change did I focus on in July?

I realised I'm really terrible at reading my bible. It makes me feel disconnected from God and just ultimately my centre strays. So, I've started reading my bible each morning before work, my alarm is set for 6am and that's when I get up. It started off pretty well and then I slipped, I'm trying my hardest to keep at it though. I'm not fantastic in the mornings but I find when I do it, it helps keep me centred on God for the day.

What am I experimenting with?

I'm trying out a new app called Exist to track all sorts of things and give me all sorts of data on my daily life. So far it's going well, I'm going to continue to use this through September to see what happens. So far it's pretty interesting but I need more data before I really get anything useful from it I think.

Top music playlists

There are a few for this month

• Humble Beast
• Heavy 2
• Summer 2015

Time spent writing code

37h 4m, this is interesting but also needs to be taken with a grain of salt, I didn't start using the software until a few weeks into the month so I expect this to be a little bit more. I'm already at 12h 15m for September. More time coding, please!

Estimated time spent engineering software

This is a hard one, my tracking software only tracks time spent at a computer in specific programs (etc) that relate to software development. As I work 5 (7h30) days a week, for August that puts me at around 187h30m. However I'm known to spend most of my evenings reading about or actually engineering, so I've added an extra three hours to each day which I think pans out with doing more on some days and less on others. I've put that up to 7 days as well just to account for weekends, I think this will mean I'm estimating less than I actually do (perhaps).

This puts me at around 257h 30m hours each month. If we add in all the months I've spent at Sparkol (just over 15 now) that'll bring us to around 3,862h 30m spent engineering software. This doesn't include any time in education that could easily bump that up, but I don't think the quality of that time was good enough to account for really.

I'm going to estimate around 3,862h 30m spent coding, I'd be tempted to bump that up to closer 3,900 (potentially even higher honestly due to weekends) because according to all my colleagues, I'm a bit obsessed. However I'll stick to the solid number I have.

August: 257h 30m~
Life time: 3,862h 30m~
Hours until 10,000h mark: 6,137h 30m
ETA: 39 months, which is just over 3 years. That'll bring my total to around 4.5 years which seems reasonable. I'm pretty sure I can get there quicker though, just think about how much more I have to learn!

Books read

I finally finished Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren. It was a challenging read, not in the sense that the words were tricky but the content of the book was very challenging to me. I've realised that there are many more areas in my life where I can become a servant to others and I now endeavour to do as such.

September

A new housemate is moving in on Monday, she's a good friend and I'm looking forward to the month ahead!

Goals to attempt

Learn Ruby and Rails, release a small open source project with it. I have one in mind, but more to come on that later.

Changes to focus on

I want to be more disciplined with my bible reading. I'll be focusing on that this month!