November 2024 (Europe, Side Projects, Hema)
November, 2024
Hello 👋
Here's a recap of what I did over the last ~30 days:
- Continued exploring Europe
- Started building side projects again
- Competed in my first HEMA competition
Exploring Europe
I continued my escapade across Western Europe and made stops in Madrid, Spain and Bremen, Germany. I learned a few things during this trip:
Staying Collected
I've come to notice that things go wrong when I travel. Never does everything work perfectly as I expected it to, whether that be an incredibly short layover because of a delayed departure, almost being refused boarding because I don't have a return flight, or having the airline lose my luggage, the last thing I should do is freak out.
I need to stay collected and keep my head on straight - especially since I'm traveling solo. I am responsible for solving my problems, and freaking out only impedes my problem solving abilities.
Improvising
When things go wrong, I'm the only person who can fix it -- and when I'm in a foreign country, it requires improvisation.
I can't expect everything, so it's better to train myself to react well to the unexpected.
Asking for Help
All airports have help desks. I initially dismissed them and told myself I could just figure things out on my own, but I eventually overcame this way of thinking. The help desks are there SO I can ask for help. Unsurprisingly, they are very helpful.
Addressing Problems Quickly
My SIM card stopped working part way through my trip, but it was almost over. I told myself I could just deal with the lack of SIM card until I came home, and I did. But I wish I didn't.
Problems compound with each other -- when I landed in Bremen without my luggage, it was exponentially worse because I also had no way of contacting anyone until I found somewhere with Wifi.
I kept thinking about Machiavelli's quote about postponing war: "One should never allow chaos to develop in order to avoid going to war, because one does not avoid war but instead puts it off to his disadvantage"
I was avoiding fixing my SIM card because I didn't feel like dealing with the problem, and it only put off my need to fix it to a less advantageous position. Instead of being in an Airbnb with food in my fridge, I was in an airport without most of my stuff, with no housing, and no method of communication.
Side Projects
For some reason I had stopped building side projects, so I started again this month. I published two websites and a python library.
greatnorth.news -- this is a website that uses sentiment analysis on news headlines to filter out the negative headlines. The feed only displays articles the sentiment analysis deems "positive." This algorithm is still faulty at times, but I wanted to publish this website as a quick proof of concept.
listmcitems.com -- this is a list of all the minecraft item IDs in alphabetical order. I needed all the minecraft IDs for a separate project I'm working on, and I thought I would publish them all in an easy to copy list.
api-chatbots -- this is a python library that makes it really easy to communicate with the Claude API or the ChatGPT API. I noticed that every time I wanted to use an LLM in a project, I would spend 5-10 minutes writing the exact same wrapper class that would facilitate communication. So I published it as a python library strictly so I can use it in my own projects easily, but maybe it will be useful for others too.
Competing in my First HEMA Competition
HEMA stands for Historical European Martial Arts. Yesterday I competed in a small sword tournament. Small swords are thrusting only weapons, meaning you can only score points by stabbing as oppose to slashing your opponent.
HEMA differs from sport fencing in that we are trying to replicate more closely the historical martial art. One of the ways this manifests is that in sport fencing, you need to lightly tap your opponent to register a point. In small sword HEMA fencing, you need to thrust hard enough for the blade to bend with contact, emulating the blade piercing your opponent if we weren't both wearing protective gear.
I'm incredibly new to HEMA, and I don't actually know the historical context of the small sword. The tournament was also yesterday, and I don't have ANY pictures or videos of it. If you would like to see what those look like, reply to this email and I'll send a few pictures and videos your way once they are posted online.
That's all for this month,
Thanks for reading!
👋
Nicolas Gatien