In January this year, I bought coupons for a movie night at a close by movie theater. This week, about 10 months later, Oogi and I finally used up those coupons. Hurray babysitters!

With all the bad movies around most of the time, I’m really happy we decided to watch Gone Girl! Really, great movie. Go watch it too, if you haven’t! 🙂

Also this week, Google ran a 1-day Cloud Platform Live event. Sadly, it took place in San Francisco, which made it somewhat difficult for me to attend. With the timezone difference, it wasn’t even reasonable for me to watch the live stream…

If you’re into cloud development, you’d probably be interested in what came out of it.

• Google Container Engine is exciting, with Kubernetes and Docker – so much potential! Maybe I can use it to cross off my DayJob todo about “better cluster management” 🙂 .
• Managed VMs in App Engine goes into beta. Also adds auto-scaling support, and Docker-based runtimes. This makes me want to move my WordPress to App Engine! Anyone put together a Docker AppEngine image with WordPress stack? 🙂
• The Compute Engine gets auto-scaling powers! Neat.
• Some network stuff, Firebase integration, cloud debugger.
• Another price reduction.

I recently read another article on financial independence. I can agree with the premise that financial independence is a worthy goal, in the sense that trading (work) time for money is entirely optional. I, too, would love to choose what to do with my time based solely on personal joy, without worrying about income.

I can’t understand, though, why most of these articles go on about “suffering for a decade or two” to achieve said financial independence. Isn’t it generally better to work in something that you enjoy most of the time for 40 years and maintain and reasonable lifestyle, instead of living like a dog for 15 years so you can have 25 years of watching TV after that?

For a living, I write code for a company that pays me to do it, and I enjoy it. If I had “financial independence” today, I’d probably write less code for the company. With the freed up time, I would most likely just write other code (and blog posts 😉 ) for myself. Maybe I could have written code for other companies that would pay me much more for it (e.g. algo-trading etc.), and get to financial independence sooner. But I don’t think it’s worth it! Why would I “sell my soul” now for more free time later?

Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe I’m in a special position that my skills, hobbies, and job intersect. Maybe most people hate their jobs. Go figure.

What would you do if you could stop worrying about money today? What does it worth to you? I’d love to know, so head to the comments! 🙂

Blog posts from the last week

1. Started an app highlights series, with Our Groceries.
2. Went into some depth about side projects and blog posts.
3. Another ShellFoo post, this time on brace expansion.
4. Started preparing my Nexus 5 for a Lollipop upgrade, with a thorough apps cleanup.
5. The previous weekly review.

In the coming weeks, I plan to continue writing on the website side project, and the SCons series. Hopefully, I will be able to squeeze in some Mac training as well. The best way to keep up with new posts is to follow the feed.

Web selections

The India Chrome App Developer Challenge for Education reached its conclusion this week. Driven by low literacy rates, the program encouraged developers to build Chrome apps for India’s primary school children with the goal of improving their reading skills. The 3 winning apps: Kahani, Action Story, and Race With Words.

Buffer wanted to raise $3.5m in funding, so they did in in a incredibly transparent process. That’s inspiring!

Pushbullet added the ability the reply to texts a couple of months ago. This week, a new update added the ability to compose new texts from the computer. So useful! I consider getting rid of MightyText, if I have good experience with the Pushbullet take on this.

A nice article on using Wavemon to monitor Wi-Fi on Raspberry-Pi.

Any.do 2.0 was released. Lifehacker covers the new features.

A short article from the Android Blog on new security features in Android 5.0 Lollipop. Smart Lock, Full device encryption is the default (key management?), SELinux Enforcing required for all apps.

Google open-sourced nogotofail – a network traffic security testing tool.

I don’t write a lot of Automator services, but if I did, I’m sure this automation from Brett Terpstra would come in useful.

Side project updates

Nothing new on the website project front.

With Android Lollipop update approaching, I’m working on preparing my Nexus 5 for the upgrade. Finished apps cleanup, and started documenting my settings and configuration.