june+july 2025

on journaling, engaging and hummus 🥙

Aug 10, 2025

timing

Well, I missed the June newsletter. I assume only the most attentive of you have noticed this, but it has loomed large in my mind.

Why? The usual summer busyness and travel.

However, I’d like to argue that June and July are basically the same month so only one newsletter is required:

both are summer months
both start with “JU”, followed by two letters

But enough about missed deadlines! That's what my job is for!

journaling

I’ve been writing one sentence everyday since February 6th.

As a result, I have a pretty accurate description of what I was doing on any given day this year. Useful if I’m ever tried in court and need an alibi.

An entry is something like:

2025.06.17 - Tuesday
First day back was intense. Many tasks. But a beautiful bike ride with folks after work :)

This is unstructured — my programmer brain would like something like this:

date: 2025.06.17
location: Victoria
activities: bike ride
people: Ashley, Alex, Julia

That way, I could write a program to extract cumulative statistics from my entries.

E.g.

Still, GPT could probably do this with unstructured (normal) entries.

Then, I could ask it questions like:

Was I injured or sick in the past month?
What dates was I in Montreal?
Who did we have dinner with on that Tuesday in April?

You may be saying:

Kahvi, that’s what having a memory is!! Just remember things!

And this is absolutely true.

travel

Following from the above, this is where I was for the months of June and July (extracted from my journal entries):

June:

01–12: Victoria
13–16: Monterey & Big Sur
17–30: Victoria

July:

01–03: Victoria
04–07: Hornby Island
08–11: Victoria
12–13: Rathtrevor Beach
14–31: Victoria

how to be more engaging on the internet

Lately, I’ve noticed how I engage more people online. It falls on two axes: how much content I put out and how personal it is.

content volume + medium

The more bytes I upload, the more people engage.

This is kind of obvious. A picture is worth a thousand words, a video is a thousand pictures, etc.

Reading a newsletter is harder than watching a Twitch stream.

So, in my opinion, the more bytes uploaded, the more attention and engagement.

personal expression

The more personal/open I am, the more people engage.

Things like showing more parts of my life and the people around me, being more honest and vulnerable, etc.

Sidenote:

It’s hard to know if this pattern is a cause or effect. As in — are you more popular online because you’re open? Or are you open because you’re more popular? Because more people will engage?