Some of my thoughts and observations on life, faith, software, changing Africa, social entreprenuership, and many more, collected in chronological order.
It amazes me every time I see something that exists now where nothing existed before. One day there was no me but at some point in history, I came to be. People, objects, ideas, songs, and even this blog post. It is more amazing when I am the one that makes that thing.
A poem inspired by a place where the Namib desert meets the Atlantic ocean
One needs a certain amount of naivety to approach problems, believing there are solutions for them. The kind of naivety that breeds curiosity. And when combined, no problem is out of the reach of a solution.
I recently sat with my friend and talked about my life-long battle with self confidence and feeling inadequate. And how God through the scriptures is helping me.
I have been observing something, that there can be a temptation to be recency-biased when it comes to the things we are grateful for. When you come through a challenging situation and get some breakthroughs, it’s easy to just focus most of ones gratitude on only the recent challenging situation you came through, but I think this can limit our gratitude.
This year, I didn't smile all the smiles I had hoped for but I look back on the year with glee at the number of people I made smile. Some I will never meet, and others I see and talk to daily. To another year, God willing, of making many more smiles.
Over the weekend I turned 28 and I read a biography of Jim Elliot and saw A Private War - a biography of Marie Colvin.
Yesterday, I worked for a total of about 9 hours. And in that time, I completed about a big part of a USSD application I am working on. Being productive felt really good.
I am currently working on a USSD application that supports switching between different gateway providers at runtime by changing a configuration value. Testing each provider test case was simple and straight forward. I would update the value in my phpunit.xml file and off I go. However, I ran into problems when I wanted to run my entire test suite
I am trying to read the whole Bible this year. I have tried four or five times already but haven’t been able to complete it. Today I read the creation story. One thing that caught my attention was the amount of time God used in completing the earth project. I have been - and I’m still - awed at how He made it all in 7 days. Today however, I am awed by how He didn’t choose to do it in a way shorter time.
The proverbial saying "new year, new beginnings" has never been so surreal to me as it is becoming this year. A good amount of the life I knew in 2018 has changed or will be changing in the next couple of months.