See all reflections.

This month, I found a team at FB, went to Italy for 16 days, started hamy.brand, reached 1k monthly visitors, and committed to living a more (~15%) sustainable life.

work

tl;dr - still getting ramped up, v excited for future

I finished bootcamp at Facebook (in case you missed it, I now work there) earlier this month, which is essentially a team-dating process with the goal of making sure everyone finds a good match with respect to people, project, and role. The idea is that better fits should lead to better satisfaction and better outcomes. I'm a fan.

The team I joined is focused on the performance and reliability of media distribution for Instagram. I decided to stick to a backend focus since a lot of my interests lately have been wrt design, efficiency, and scale wrt distributed systems / architectures and I think that's where I'll be able to scratch that itch with the highest probability. Also I love Insta (as demonstrated by my opening of a brand new one this month, bringing my grand total to ~8).

The services I'll be working on are predominantly written in Python so I've been taking some time to brush up on it by reading books and building small projects. So far I actually really like it - it's come a long way since I last used it and I forgot how good the developer ecosystem / support is. I'll likely be building a lot more future projects with .py.

adventure

tl;dr - 2 days after joining my FB team I went to Italy for 16 days

Two days after I joined my team, I upped and left for Italy for 16 days. This is a trip that we'd had planned for a few months and although it wasn't the greatest timing, it was a great time.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Hamilton Greene (@sir.hamy) on Aug 25, 2019 at 12:46pm PDT

Still getting back into my normal habits like working out, eating veggies, and not sitting on a beach, but I was able to make some progress on things I don't usually give time to which has led to some cool outcomes. Observe:

projects

blinder

As part of my recent art focus (my new HAMY.ART site released last month) and my effort to brush up on my Python skills / leverage my love of building into more areas of my life, I built a script combining found images, AI, and generative art called Blinder.

links:

• See more Blinder images on Instagram or my site
• Read more about how Blinder works / was built

hamy.brand

Blinder left me with a lot of cool visual outputs and my trip to Italy got me thinking a lot about world fashion. Together, they created enough impetus to get me to make moves on a project I've long joked about - creating a HAMY brand.

So I went ahead and created HAMY.BRAND (my 8th Insta) and an associated shop which will house all purchasable HAMY RL (real life) goods.

I'm obviously super new to this and don't really know what I'm doing but I'm excited to learn. Part of that is getting people to tell me what they think, so if you've got a few minutes please check out the new Insta and shop and let me know your thoughts!

links:

• The @hamy.brand account is still new but I plan to have more content coming soonish. Probably gonna have pics of me cause I can't resist.
• The shop is live at https://shop.hamy.xyz. Yeah seriously, you can buy stuff.

iamhamy

My old projects are still chugging along. This month, I hit a big milestone of 1k monthly visitors across the Hamniverse even without a big reflection post which is dope. A chart for your troubles:

As you can see HAMY.LABS is the biggest draw to my sites (at ~96% of all traffic) likely due to its tech-focused posts (which search engines (and searchers) love).

My top 3 posts:

• An article on how to copy and paste in an illustration app, bringing in ~70% (!!!) of all my traffic that I wrote way back in 2016
• How to change placeholder text in a common React component with ~11% of traffic
• A solution to a common C# error caused by a core library not being auto-imported with ~8% of traffic

Not exactly what I thought the internet would like from me but the internet does what it wants /shrug

self

There's been a lot of changes in my life recently, most notably getting settled in with my new job and my 2 week trip. I haven't been as grounded or as habitual as I want so I'll be focusing on that in the coming month.

I have taken a lot of time to think though as multi-hour plane / train / taxi rides provide a lot of room for it. In the process, I released thoughts on:

• Why you should care about climate change
• Small changes I've made that result in an ~15% reduction in my (measured) planetary resource usage - What I'm doing to help the Amazon (and the planet)
• Various thoughts on brevity, how to face challenges, and making good decisions when you can't fully understand a problem

fin

That's it. Hope everyone enjoyed their summer, it's pretty much over.

CALLOUTS:

• CALLOUT1: Take a look at @hamy.brand and lmk what you think
• CALLOUT2: Small personal changes to your lifestyle can have outsized impacts. Consider making some for the planet. Like giving $10 / month or eating a chicken sandwich instead of a burger. I did the footwork for you so all you gotta do is bring the mindfulness and intent.

See y'all next month at #2019q3hamniversebonanzathon right here on HAMY.BLOG.

-HAMY.OUT