
These are the things that I expect being able to do during this new year 2022. There are a lot of things that I want to tell, but I just don't know how.

1. do exercise 3 times a week
2. write one article per week
3. get my driver's licence
4. travel again


## Do exercise 3 times a week

I decided that I'm going to get up early in the morning, not too early, but before work, and I'll go ride my bycicle. The countryside on this part of Chile is quite nice and relaxing, so I'll try to do this a routine.

I'm also thinking of joining a gym, but no so sure of that really, I'll start with this more simple step for me.

## Write one article per week
I'll do this one incrementaly, since my current speed on this is very bad and not very periodical, I'm setting a time each week to do it and hopefully get to the point were I can write one article per week.

I'll start during the days that I'm not doing exercise in the morning and use that time to write something, it can be anything, I just want to do it.

## Get my driver's licence
During the time travelling on Europe we noticed that it would be nice to be able to rent a car once in a while and use that to move around the places you visit, specially when you're staying kind of far away from the main attractions. I don't particularly want to own a car, but being able to drive is a big plus when needed and I want to be ready for that.

## Travel again
I don't know how soon can I do this again, since I came back to Chile for a reason, but I hope that during this year I can go back to a plane and travel around, I think that I need that, seriously.

New Year's Resolutions

As I said before, I'm currently unemployed and taking some time off from work and, in particular, from programming stuff. I've done some things during this past month, in particular a coding assignment for a new job that I'm applying to, but that's it.

Now, travelling through Rome in Italy, I'm again in that moment where I feel a bit lost, I can't find a purpose or reason for doing stuff.* I had a kind of breakdown the other day where I felt that **everything was meaningless**.* I think that I still believe that, since that has been my way of thinking for a long time already, but someone very important to me held me in her arms and just told me this:

> Don't give up on the world

I have to say, it made me break into tears.

After a couple of days from that moment, my mind is still trying to recover from those dark thoughts, trying to keep them under control. Is hard for me, I don't think it is impossible, but certainly hard.

And just now, what gave me the strength to write this, was watching this old video again, a meditation from **Pico Iyer**, "the art of stillness". Is a long favorite of mine, I rewatch it from time to time and it always helps me. You can watch it here, is a 15 minutes video, that for me is completely worth it.

<Video type="youtube" src="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUBawr1hUwo"  id="aUBawr1hUwo" />

> "So in an age of acceleration, nothing can be more exhilarating than going slow. And in an age of distraction, nothing is so luxurious than paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is so urgent as sitting still." 

Take care of your mental health and don't give up on the world.

JC

Sitting still

I've been in Spain since August 3, almost one month has passed by and it feels like time has been passing so fast here. I need to tell you the story of why I'm here and how I reached this decision.

For the record, I'm just here as a tourist, I don't have a special visa or anything, but my **Chilean passport** gives me the opportunity to [visit the Schengen area for up to 90 days](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Chilean_citizens), without leaving.

<Image 
    src="https://blogaravena.files.wordpress.com/2021/08/carles-rabada-kmde0v9tyym-unsplash-1.jpg" 
    alt="Aerial view of Sagrada Familia and its neighbourhood by <a href='https://unsplash.com/photos/kMde0v9tYYM'>Carles Rabada on Unsplash</a>"
    width="1200"
    height="700"
/>

So, I wrote in the [previous post that I'm unemployed](https://aravena.me/blog/having-a-cup-of-tea) right now and that continues to be the case, I left Evernote after just 5 months for a couple of reasons, but the main one was my mental state; I was in a very delicate state, for a whole week, maybe a bit more, I could not work at all, I didn't have any strength to do anything, so I would just lie around my house, like a zombie. After this I chose to take a medical leave, the psychiatrist gave me 30 days of rest. After I came back, just one week after, **I resigned**.

I'll leave the details for another post, I need to let this out before joining a different company, if I do that. But what I can say now is that, during my medical leave, at some point I bought a plane ticket to Lisbon, Portugal, it was a cheap one way flight ticket. This happened on June 2 and at the time, I was banned from visiting Portugal coming from Chile, because of COVID, of course, so I got the idea that, maybe at the departure time, the Portugal borders would be open for me. It didn't happen.

The date was getting closer and no new updates about it, so I kind of gave up with the idea of traveling, but I started to look at Spain, because my ticket had a connection in Madrid, and just after ~2 weeks before the departure, **Spain opened its borders for fully vaccinated people**. I've been vaccinated, with my 2 doses, since April. This was my chance.

Since it was a connection, I would not be able to bring a big luggage, just a hand suitcase and a backpack with me in the cabin, because if I checked in any luggage in the plane, it would arrive in Lisbon, but I was not able to go there. So I did and on August 2 I took a plane from Chile and arrived in Madrid the day after.

Now I'm spending some wonderful time in Barcelona with my girlfriend in a rented Airbnb, close to the beach. I even went out to run with her yesterday. Me running? Yep, it happened and I hope it keeps happening.


JC

Spending some time in Barcelona

It's 1:42am, a very cold night on the last days of autumn, and I'm having a cup of tea.

Green tea.

This Tuesday was a nice day, a different one during this boring unemployed life during a pandemic. I woke up late, got up even later. The first thing I did was light the woodplace, my everyday task. After that I got a cup of coffee and went out and meditated for an hour.

Did I say unemployed? Yes, but that's for another day. Anyway, during my meditation my sister interrupted me and told me that I had to make lunch today. She remembered me, thb. I was supposed to make mashed potatoes.

After I got up from my meditation, I started making lunch, since it was already quite late, past 1.30pm, I couldn't start baking the potatoes now, so I ended up making french fries. I accompanied this with some baked vegetables and mushrooms.

Did you know I love mushrooms? I do, but the raw texture is kind of weird, I prefer them baked or fried.

The rest of the day was the same as every day. Just sit and let the day pass. I made some internal changes to this website, and I hope they work as expected. I used to write on blogs when I was younger, since I was interested in everything related to the internet I wanted to be part of it, so I started to learn how to set up my own, all the time changing and [starting all over again](https://aravena.me/blog/hello-world).

The most successful one and the one that I'm very fond of, some very nice memories from having it, was one called [Blooging!](https://web.archive.org/web/20100216161043/http://www.blooging.net/), a blogging related blog where I used to write tips, tutorials and sometimes things related to web programming. That link is from the Wayback Machine, I don't have any backup or picture of it now.

Now that I think about it, I used to love blogging. I hope I can do it again.

And now, at 2:08am in the morning, **I'm having a cup of tea**.

<Image 
    src="https://blogaravena.files.wordpress.com/2021/07/yasasi-rajapakse-sri-lanka-unsplash.jpg" 
    alt="Tea fields in Sri Lanka by <a href='https://unsplash.com/photos/poadBPsShxg'>Yasasi Rajapakse on Unsplash</a>"
/>


Having a cup of tea

A lot of tech companies decide at some point that they need to "fix the basics", but sadly some of them just refer to rebuild their technology, not a change in the development process. History repeats itself, let's never forget about that.

This is not an article about how to do the fixing, that's different for every company, all of them have their own problems, we can't just grab a "playbook" and think that everything will go as planned, it's a challenge and one that involves more that just making from scratch your code, with the idea that this time it will go well, it's about making decisions that affect the way that you approach work, because if you don't change the way you work, why do you believe that your product will be different this time?

If you find yourself in a company that's going through a process of "fixing the basics", remind your managers, tech leads and whoever is in charge of something inside, that if we don't change our process to do delivery, the same thing will likely happen again.

I recently heard "that's how we do things here, is very relax" and that made me worried a bit, not because of the relaxing part, I really like that, but because I don't see much technical vision, everyone does things as they want, just one person know about one part of the product, so is difficult to share context between the team and there are very few moments where the team can align how to build stuff that affects the features as a whole. This is the reason that made me think about the process, if no one is accountable of the way that we work, even if we rewrite stuff from scratch, is likely that problems will occur again, having to threw away the new work at some point, not too far in the future.

Software engineering is considered an engineering career, because we follow engineering practices and that implies having to "plan" stuff before just diving in the code and hack our way around to build stuff.

I have no intentions on writing how one must do things, just trying to remember whoever reads this that we have to be responsible and accountable of what we do, if we want things to last for a long time, let's take our time to design before starting to write code.

Fixing the basics is not just about code

In my journey to build this blog, as I mentioned in [the first post](/blog/hello-world), I created a custom editor where I can write my articles, using `MDX`, a mix of `Markdown` and `JSX`, this way I can write some powerful and dynamic articles, with code and live execution of that code.

 ![Example of the current editor](https://blogaravena.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/editor-example.jpg)
 
That image above is an example of how it looks right now, not too many options, but as you can see there's a live preview on the right side, and this is what I want to talk about now. As a live preview, it updates on every change made in the editor on the left, even when writing `JSX` code. This was challenging to me, because the component crashes if there is invalid MDX on the editor, for example, when you're just typing some code, like this incomplete button: `<butt`. It completely crashes, without any option to recover.

To fix this, I thought on a way to "cache" the component, in the last valid state, if there's any error in the future state, instead of throwing an error, it will render the cached version, until the `MDX` in the editor is valid.

## Error Boundaries
In React there is a concept called [Error Boundaries](https://reactjs.org/docs/error-boundaries.html), that let's you create a **class component** that will handle wherever "crash" happens on your code. Imagine it like a `try/catch` feature. I won't go into depth in that here, instead I recommend you to read that piece of documentation.

If you were paying attention, you saw that I said *class component* previously and that's because there's no way, natively, to do this using **functional components**, but there's a library that let's us do this called [`react-error-boundary`](https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-error-boundary). Read [this article by Kent C. Dodds](https://kentcdodds.com/blog/use-react-error-boundary-to-handle-errors-in-react) that explains how it works.

## Caching a component
In the example presented on the previous article I linked, he uses the `ErrorBoundary` component that you can import from the library, here I'm going to use a `HOC` (High Order Component) that will let us do the same, this is called `withErrorBoundary`.

The following example is the exact same thing that I'm using right now for my preview component:

```JSX
const Component: FunctionComponent<ComponentProps> = ({ content }) => {
	const [validState, setValidState] = useState<string>('');

	const WithErrorComponent = withErrorBoundary(ComponentThatCanThrow, {
		FallbackComponent: () => CacheComponent,
		onError() {
			console.log('onError');
		},
	});

	const CacheComponent = useMemo(() => (
		<ComponentThatCanThrow state={validState} setValidState={setValidState} />
	), [validState]);

	return <WithErrorComponent state={content} setValidState={setValidState} />
};
```

Here we're defining `Component` as a component that will render the `ComponentThatCanThrow` component. To avoid it from throwing an error and crashing the page, we manage an state `validState` and, with the help of the `useMemo` API, we cache a version of the `ComponentThatCanThrow` with the valid state.

On line 4 we use the `withErrorBoundary` HOC that I mentioned previously:

```JSX
    const WithErrorComponent = withErrorBoundary(ComponentThatCanThrow, {
        FallbackComponent: () => CacheComponent,
        onError() {
            console.log('onError');
        },
    });
```
This is the actual component that we end up returning on our component and its definition is pretty straightforward. The first argument is the component that can throw and then we pass some custom props to it, the first is the fallback that we want to render, in case of an error and the second is just a callback that will be executed when we have an error.

In our case, following the first code above, the fallback component is the same component that can throw, but with a `validState`, so our component will render the same cached one until it finds itself with a valid state again. We pass the `validState` and `setValidState` props to it, so it will update the state when is a valid one.

## Real component
Until now we only know that the component that can throw is called `ComponentThatCanThrow`, so let's take a look at how it should be to work with our implementation:

```JSX
const ComponentThatCanThrow: FunctionComponent<ComponentProps> = ({ state, setValidState }) => {
	useEffect(() => {
		setValidState(state);
	}, [state]);

	return (
		<MDX>
			{state}
		</MDX>
	);
};
```

Here the part that can throw is the `MDX` component. We update the `validState` of the parent component after the first render, with the  `useEffect` API. This will only be executed if the component doesn't throw with the current `state`, so we know its a valid one. If it throws, it won't be updated and our `CacheComponent` will keep the previous valid state.

I don't know exactly who needs something like this on the usual react project, but it certainly is useful to me on my website. Feel free to ask if there's is anything you want to know about it.

JC's Writing

New Year's Resolutions

Sitting still

Spending some time in Barcelona

Having a cup of tea

Fixing the basics is not just about code

Error boundaries and cached components