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I like having some estimate of how good my unit tests are covering my code. That is especially true for libraries I publish for others to use. I’m making some updates and upgrades to my Dart Result Monad library . I had to dust off my knowledge of doing code coverage in Dart since it had been awhile. It is relatively straightforward to generate these statistics for your Dart and Flutter…
In this post I laid out how I fake out speaking immersion for studying European Portuguese. That’s only one small part of the puzzle though. The other three components of language learning I want to try to recreate immersion on are: reading, writing, and listening. How do I go about faking out immersion in those areas?
They say one of the best ways to learn a language is immersion. That is often thought of primarily as living in a country and being forced to use it on a day-to-day basis. That is obviously one very good version of immersion but there are other methods to getting daily practice with a language. One of the hardest ones for me when learning Spanish was getting over the hump of “Think in…
As I ramp up my Portuguese language learning I want to start writing in it more as well. That is beyond the stuff I’m doing in my language apps and in my classes. For both of those I am basically using the iOS Portuguese/English combined keyboard or hand writing the lesson homework out. When on a Mac I can use the same techniques that I had back when I studied Spanish several decades ago,…
Another year in the books provides yet another opportunite to look at how things have held up for me on the longevity/health objectives I set out for myself. In 2023 I started a fitness reboot that totally transformed my mindset on exercise and rebooted my nutrition too. In 2024 I continued that momentum forward to the most dialed in year I ever had. I achieved athletic goals that I wasn’t…
I’ve done these annual reviews of my health/fitness/longevity journey every year going back to 2017. Every year it is the same lament about how off track I was most of the year. Last year was the first year where I had the better part of a year in a solidly performing zone. This year is the first one where I had an entire year in the solidly performing zone, having extended the fitness…
I did the high level recap in my first post about my running the Jacksonville Marathon. That was more the nitty gritty technical details. I wanted to capture more of the whole experience as well though.
When I wrote down my short and long term running goals back in April I didn’t think I’d realistically be able to knock out my two shorter term goals in the same year: running a half marathon strong and a full marathon strong. I knew I’d get the half done because I had one scheduled for that month but I wasn’t sure if I’d finish it strong. I did finish it strong.…
Flutter architecturally is pretty agnostic about how one wires the state and business logic into the Flutter UI. It has no “standard” way of doing it although it does provide the foundational architecture to build declarative UIs. Most people use a framework on top of that to achieve it in a more intuitive and streamlined way. One such popular framework is Riverpod , “A Reactive…
I’ve been meaning to document a couple of tips/tricks about Dart hashmaps for some time. It’s things I’m often looking up and/or double checking which would be better to just have on my blog.
May proved to be more of a struggle to keep things at a high level of performance. Some things, like a COVID relapse causing me to be more cautious on ramping up working out, explain part of it. Some things are me trying to transform my working out into something more focused on running performance but with side effects. Others are me just feeling more slack this month. Overall it wasn’t…
April was supposed to be an easier month for me. That turned out to be kind of true. Goal Accountability grades definitely reflect that. I’m happy with the performance.
I’ve been wanting to write this post for a few months now. Each time I want to commit it to “paper” I’m afraid I’m going to jinx myself by actually writing it down. My primary focus when it comes to exercise is extending my healthspan. Everything else is secondary to that. I can’t deny, though, that I get a charge out of distance running. I love the personal…
When I had my first bout of getting into running in the 2011/2012 period it was clear to me that I should have some sort of benchmark to measure my progress. While it was possible to measure VO2Max and heart rate zones with an expensive test I didn’t want to rely on that. Instead I devised my own running fitness test that I could repeatably do over time to see changes in my cardiovascular…
I knew going into March that there would be challenges meeting or exceeding how well I did in February. The month was as full of travel and stressors as I had anticipated, maybe even more so. I’m pleased to report that while I didn’t maintain my February good grades across the board I was able to keep it together more than I did in January.
In today’s example of “this is why I blog”: as I implement Zone 2 training for doing distance running again I was lamenting not having done so for my 2013 marathon training. According to my race recap post it turns out I did implement Zone 2 training. Well, I thought I had anyway. Looking back over the data however it is pretty clear that I did not. That’s not just a…
February was a lot stronger showing than January, especially in the diet department. Whether I can keep that momentum moving forward into a much more difficult March will be the challenge.
I’m a bit late on my closeout/kickoff for the goal accountability but here we have it. So how did I do with meeting my goals for January and what are my plans for goals for February?
At the beginning of the month I did a week long “water” fast meant to potentially reduce my life-long cancer risk. The methodology I was trying for was described in this kick-off post . With now two weeks of data for the period afterward I can fully document how successfully the fast went and what the effects were on my immediately measurable and tracked biomarkers. What is impossible…
It’s about time for me to ramp up my second week long fasts. I developed this for my own needs and did the first try of it back in July, as documented here . For this second round I’m going to be tweaking some things based on lessons learned from my first attempt. Below I’ll outline everything again and the changes I’m making to it. The usual disclaimer applies: I am not a…