The Week I Sprained My Ankle In The Mountains

This Week:

Finally completing my major software refactor.
The camp spot I found with gorgeous views.
How I sprained my ankle this week.

October 2024

Su	M	T	W	Th	F	S
29	30	10/1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30	31	11/1	2

Where In The World Was I?

Denver, Colorado, U.S.
🌲 The mountains of Colorado, U.S.

Metrics From The Week

Business Progress Update

Finishing The Database Refactor

This week I finally closed out working on this major refactor of my data to a database (and honestly an entire codebase restructure)! I got all the data migrated and all the pages back to a good working state. It’s been quite a journey the past ~3 weeks but it’s all for the best!

Optimizing All The Things

This week was a lot of optimizing… like… a lot of optimizing… Optimizing models, queries, and database indices, parallelizing requests, changing how I refetch data, splitting out services into microservices, adding background job workers, caching, adding more web server workers, etc.

There’s again nothing really new to show this week visually.

It was a lot of back and forth: tweak a query, push the changes, realize the queries are still taking too long, optimizing more, push the changes, etc. I desperately wanted to get back to baseline user experience and not have queries and requests take longer than they “should.”

BUT, the big achievement this week is that as a result of all the optimizing, I finally feel like my software is in a good enough state to open it back up to users.

So now that we’re back to baseline, everything from here on is making the software more valuable. That’s the more exciting work.

With this, I’m going to start pushing against my perfectionism to get this back in the hands of users and getting feedback. It’s been too long and I feel like I’m getting too far into this mindset of wanting things to be perfect instead of getting feedback.

Final Days In Denver

Beautiful fall colors!

Back To The Mountains

I was starting to feel that urban van life was significantly less efficient in terms of ability to work compared to the times I’ve spent camping in the mountains/forests.

All the little 15 minute drives add up… After working in a coffee shop, I have to drive to a park to have lunch, I can’t just take 2 steps off my bed to start making lunch.

And then I realized just how much of a time sink showering is. I gotta drive another 15 minutes from wherever I am to the gym, throw my stuff in a bag, walk over, shower, walk back, etc. etc.

It’s all tradeoffs…

But with that in mind I felt like I’d make more progress towards my goals working in the mountains than in Denver, so I hit the road. But this time, I went north.

Snow!

I found a great spot perched on top of this little hill.

With some incredible views…

And got back to work.

But this time I started scaling back my workouts. I didn’t do any strength training, instead going on a run one day and skipping the next.

It’s getting cold up here! Highs between 45-55ºF (7-13ºC) and lows overnight 25-35ºF (-4-2ºC). I’ll admit that’s made it less enticing to spend much time outside 😬

But I was still going for my morning and afternoon walks.

That is, until…

The Ankle Sprain

Welp, I sprained my ankle and story isn’t even that good

It’s 3:45pm and I’m grinding away.

I get up to take a quick break and move my solar panel and stretch the legs.

I open my van door and take a step down with my left foot…

and BANG my ankle folds to the outside and my knee bends to catch myself.

Immediately my ankle starts hurting… way more than just a little ankle roll.

I started getting lightheaded and took a seat in my camping chair to get a breather while I figured out what the heck just happened.

It was just a little rock, a bit bigger than the others, but I happened to step down at in just the right spot and just the perfect angle to roll my ankle.

I was in a lot of denial that this really happened… Me? Right now? Nahh com’on. But at the end of the day I’m not gonna reverse reality. Sometimes ya just gotta run with the punches.

I wish I had a more exciting story than that… something involving bears and fighting but 🤷‍♂️

The most ironic part… 3 hours before this while I was eating lunch, I was watching this YouTube video from Bryan Johnson 😂 “How Quickly Can I Fix My Broken Ankle?” sharing his story of when he broke his ankle a couple months ago and all the therapies he used to heal it.

How’s It Going?

The next morning was very painful, I could barely even put pressure on my foot, but it wasn’t black and blue. I hobbled around outside putting up my solar panel and skipped my walk.

But by the end of the day, it felt a lot better, I could stand and put pressure on my foot, and even do a bit of walking if I kept my foot in the straight direction (not rolled like how I hurt it).

And by day 2, it actually feels a lot better. I can actually walk carefully without the pain I felt the first 24 hours. There’s a bit of lingering swelling, but not nearly as bad as it could be…

I’m inclined to say it was just a big overstretch/strain on the muscles/tendons on the top of the foot and not much else. It seems to be healing quickly, so I’ll be very pleased if it keeps going this way.

Thoughts From The Week

I asked the guys in the community I’m in for if and how they focus for more than 6-7 hours per day. What they said was interesting and actually did motivate me to buckle in more this week Can you actually focus for more than 7 hours a day?

Something else I talked about in the ankle sprain video Welp, I sprained my ankle and story isn’t even that good was that I’ve been sacrificing my exercise/working out for working in the past couple days. As a result, there have been a couple instances where I just feel more tight or don’t have as good of a range of motion than previously. It was even more ironic (or maybe deserved?) that I sprained my ankle at the same time… I’ve been pushing really hard getting my software back to baseline state and ready for a launch… I’m excited to get back to a more balance life where I value and prioritize exercising, stretching, working out, etc. more than this current chapter. But, that’s the sacrifice I’ve started to make for the most recent part of this grind chapter.