The past week has been pretty busy. I’m back in South Africa after two months of being in the UK and the USA, and it feels good. There really is no place like this on earth. The travel here was less than ideal, in which I was making my way from the US to South Africa over a 30 hour stretch. I didn’t sleep for 24 hours, and the jet lag hit me really hard. I’m finally recovering, so will start with the good routine soon.

Cape Town

This Friday on Christmas day I’ll be travelling to my other home - Cape Town. It is objectively the most beautiful place in the world, and I’m really looking forward to seeing my good friends that side. There will be loads of hiking and trail running which I’ve missed so much from being in the US.

I’ll also be meeting the CTO of 22seven to chat about my banking project. This should be really interesting, and I’m looking forward to the insights from the meet and greet. Hopefully we’ll get to smash some Origin coffee during the chat - hands down the best coffee I’ve had to date.

It would also be good to meet up with my old colleagues from OnNet, they’re still doing some really interesting and ambitious stuff.

USA - Round 2

I’ll be heading back to the US in January, this time for six months. It’s going to be a great experience, and I’m looking forward to the work I’ll be doing there. The market there is interesting, and it’s exciting to get insight into it. Being just south of DC is a big win too, that city has something special about it.

I’ll definitely miss my friends and family, but the pros definitely outweigh the cons on this one.

Animetflix

To help get over jet lag, and still be productive, I decided to build out a project I’ve been wanting to for a while. The project is called Animetflix (anime + Netflix), and I’ve detailed it here. It was great doing a project in Meteor, and I’d forgotten how productive you could be in a short space of time. I’ve been using the project and I’m stoked with the results so far.

Banking project

I have yet to touch the banking project, but I will be putting in some hours on Thursday, so will hopefully be finishing up the accounts listing, deposits and payments in the iOS app. This might be a bit ambitious, but Swift has proven pretty easy to pick up. Once that is done I’ll be able to share the app and the payment ecosystem can begin, although I’d like to implement TLS in the sockets on the app before showing the world.

After the great experience using Meteor, I’ll more than likely opt to build the front end using it. From this past experience, I’ll probably have something up in under 6 hours once I’ve hashed some designs and functionality out.

Hopefully once the above functionality is in place, it will be enough to garner more interest in the project, and as a result more insight into the inner workings of the finance industry, particularly retail banking.

Website update

I’ve been using Hugo for my blog posts since inception, and thought it’s about time to merge my main site into the blog. I bought an awesome image off Creative Market, added some pages and made the switch. I love having a static site, and Hugo is really a great way to generate posts (markdown is awesome).

I also made a change to the theme I use and submitted a pull request/issue. This is the first proper open source contribution, so that was pretty fun. The change was to add the og:image tag to all pages, switching depending on the page and if the values were present. Small change, but a good one.

Conclusion

Overall, good things lie ahead with a lot to forward to. Can’t wait to unwind a bit (while still squeezing some studies in).