I want to focus on achieving three primary goals in 2025:

1. Improve Communication Skills (i.e. speaking)
2. Rails - Build more applications
3. Fitness - Get Moving

Improve Communication Skills

I want to focus on verbal communication skills. To accomplish this goal, I am going to start building more in public, record videos of myself talking on an array of subject matters (maybe programming, spreadsheets, or other doing things I enjoy).

The goal is to take action on something I learned and share it with the public.

I am learning how to create and handle Rails ActionViews with multiple associations. There are many ways to handle associations in rails and I have not seen a consistent use of one paradigm. It is a challenge to think through which model should be saved first, what associated data may already be in the database that you can use option_from_collection_for_select or the fields_for method, or determine which view to modify to bring in the association.

In Ruby on Rails, the MVC concept is easy to follow when you have a non-relational type of model. The difficulty with rails is that I find organizing and creating the MVC around multiple model associations. The resources and views of associated models seem linked together and brittle. As if I make a change and it breaks a lot of the default views code or the create and update actions. I fear I am misunderstanding rails. I looked through all the guides and there doesn’t appear to be good explanation for how to deal with the views of complex associations. Even on the web, there seems to be limited discussion on this topic.

I read a great quote from Clifford Nass, a psychology professor at Standford University. Here’s what he says regarding multitasking:

People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy. They can’t manage a working memory. They’re chronically distracted.

T2200.ca was launched in early November, and rather than an official launch it was more of a test. Each week I have been making updates to the site to enhance just a little each day. Small incremental changes were done to slowly build it up. I guess this is an Agile approach. Pushing a lot of updates over the course of time makes the journey easier as all the small changes begin to add up.

I started using Neovim for the past couple of months. It is a steep learning curve, and it is painful to write code because I have to keep thinking about going into edit mode. The pain rapidly subsides whenever I discover a faster way to insert, delete, or replace a block of text or characters. Here’s an example, if I press the character d then shift-$, it will delete all the characters from the active cursor position to the end of the line.

I am in the process of reading Dreyer’s English by Benjamin Dreyer. There are a lot of inconsistencies and oddities in English, and the author goes into great detail, in a fun and charming way, by providing crisp and concise ways of describing many common pitfalls of grammar. It is a great book to boost your confidence in your writing.

Grammar books are often dry, but Benjamin provides amusing cases and examples to make grammar lessons memorable. I highly recommend giving this book a read.

I attended a Intro to Xero workshop today. I learned that cloud accounting is the way of the future and not moving forward with this trend maybe costly if you do not merge your clients to the cloud. The promise of the cloud is working with one data on one platform which allows for a better connection with clients because you can always check in with clients as they are going through the bookkeeping process rather than at year end. Furthermore, with the bank feeds which makes data entry easier and less error prone. Client will actual use the software more frequently and get better reports for sale figures and HST reports. Therefore, the cloud enables so much more than the traditional bookkeeping software which is usually on the clients desktop inaccessible to the accountant, so mistakes cannot be identified until year end.

Introduction

To become a yoga instructor, you most certainly spent a lot of your time, energy and not to mention your hard-earned “cash” for yoga instructor training. You completed the training, and you earned respect and experience to become a professional yoga instructor. As a result, you are now making money as a yoga instructor at one or multiple yoga studios. So the question is, how does a yoga instructor report their earnings on their personal tax return?