week four reflections

Somehow more surprises than I expected.

blogging

I want to believe that consistency beats talent or luck (most probably nothing beats luck). In that regard, I have been doing small but consistent improvements to my blog. My approach is one commit a day: big or small but one a day. Some months ago I wanted to start blogging but the old library was completely brocken, I could not even build it on the new machine. After some resaerch I decided to go with 11ty. Static site generator written in JavaScript.

This week I learned and implemented Open Graph (OG) images. I used the approach of Juan Fernandes. He uses the Cloudinary service. Their product builds on the fascinating idea that over URL one can define image processing, like cutting, blurring, and putting a logo (that is what Juan is doing). After two days and maybe 30 mins - 1 hour effort I got the following OG image in Telegram:

What I liked in the approach is the ease with which the URL API of the Cloudinary can be used. What I did not like is the dependency. I will follow up on that later.

On Facebook, it also looks good, but Twitter still is not happy. I used Webpagebot to force OG image update on Telegram. I did not dig deeper into the OG and meta tags yet, but the topic seems important for the further development of the blog.

metrics

I want to start counting impressions on Google Analytics and subscribers on Telegram. So far I want to focus on two means: a personal blog and a Telegram channel. I am thinking about producing other than text forms of content but not now, only in the next months... As you see from the weekly report below, either no one is reading my blog yet or no one accepts the cookies.

Today I have created the channel. No one knows about it yet so the number is 1 - me.

skills and knowledge

Here is how my rating and ranking look on LeetCode:

This week I solved the Fibonacci numbers problem with recursion. That solution is not the most efficient. Moreover, it is the most inefficient among the provided ones. Only reading the answers I realized that the matrix multiplications approach was familiar to me, as I showed in 2016 how RasperryPi with this algorithm beats Core i5 with the recursive solution. I used the Python visualization library for comparison. Thus, problem-solving skills become rusty when not used actively.

body and soul

I am this week trying out three 7-minute long sessions every morning: warm-up exercises for the back and stretching. I like the outcome. I also found that these ones encourage mindfulness more than HIIT.

With meditation practice I am on minimum: only one 21-minute-long before going to sleep.