I hope this will not bite me hard, but today marks day I’m rewriting core part of Forged in Swift. Strategy is simple:

• Step 1: Translate Objective-C to Swift without Swift-y bits.
• Step 2: Refactor obviously Objective-C translated code into swifty Swift.
• Step 3: Learn more about Swift.
• Step 4: Goto step 2.

There is something majestic in lonely 3776 meter volcano standing on the wast flat land. No wonder Japanese almost worship it.

Disappointed after watching Point Break, remake of 1994 sports classic. Out of curiosity, visited IMDB page — 5.4 rating, no surprising. I’ve also noticed common theme among user reviews: “GoPro and Red Bull decided to shoot a movie”. Ironically, Red Bull does indeed shoot documentary sports movies, and they are way better than that.

Renewal of this website required a bit of digging into Ruby again. It’s amazing how well syntax of language sticks to brain, but tricks and “nice ways” of doing things just fade away. To be fair, even though I love Ruby dearly, it was never in my professional tool-set.

I’m quite good at sticking to healthy diet when it comes to weight management. But, there is one thing that has total and manipulative control over my brain—cookies. Had a ton of them past few days and as a result I don’t have enough power to train. Nutritious food is essential. [Duh.]

Apparently, smartwatches outnumbered Swiss watch sales in Q4 of 2015. I’m not surprised people are re-discovering utility of wrist watch, especially when smartwatches are more useful, cost less and don’t have elitist tag attached.

There are some benefits from mad weather in Kanazawa.

Hi, this is a snippet. Snippets, or microposts, are short blog entries that are too long for Twitter, but too short (or out of scope) for dedicated article. Snippets on this website are unorganized by design. This makes it easy for me to write pretty much about anything that comes to my mind worth sharing. Hope you enjoy them. There even is dedicated micropost only RSS feed this website.

The App: Hello World

This, dear reader, is journal of my journey. Journey to something I’ve been dreaming of for a long time, one that began to seem realistic an year ago. Somewhere 18 to 20 month ago, I “cracked a secret” of weight loss, which is not even close of being something complicated: calorie counting and self-discipline. Former is easy, latter — not so much. One without another doesn’t work at all. With a bit of an effort, I managed to change my habits and lifestyle so I could count calories for months in a row. That did pay off.

Today, marks the day my BMI is roughly on 25 mark for the whole year. I’m changed, so is my lifestyle. My BMI is no longer 34.6, not even close. As a result I can run, swim, bike and climb. Or… so I thought.

Getting rid of more than 25 kilograms (55 lbs.) does help quite a lot; Not only for endurance sports, but for everyday life of sedentary programmer, like me. It is huge relief, but apparently not enough for sport. First attempt at running was quite a failure. I’ve lost my breath around 1K mark and that was it: total disappointment and loss of motivation for a few month. I couldn’t understand what was going on. I lost vast amount of weight and I still couldn’t do uninterrupted 1K. Fortunately, training books had an answers for that. As with calorie counting, I discovered that human body is just a sack of chemical and physics processes. Rather complicated one, but still…

Pacing was a key. First day I went out running with my fancy new heart-rate-monitoring watch, was a one of my happiness days in my life. I could run 5K without agony, hatred and utter disgust at idea of running. I could run 5K, period. My running pace was slow, and my heart rate jumped all over the place even on slightest hills, but that didn’t matter. I knew recipe and direction where to head. That day was six month ago and I’m loving every single run and bike ride since then. There is still long and hard way to go. My pace is poor, weight is still a bit high, diet could be better, plan is just shaping out and tools to monitor and understand my body and fitness level are not as good as I’d like them to be. So, being a geek and software developer, I decided to fix this.

This is where you join me.

I’m working on a fitness app for iPhone and Apple Watch.

“What? Yet another?” — You may had a reasonable thought.

Lets me explain.

In my experience, becoming healthy or athletic is hard. Hard, complicated and relatively slow process that requires planning, research, time, tools and hard work. In essence, it is a project. Just like a Build A Bridge or Prepare Quarterly Report only but Run 5K or Finish Ironman Under 9 Hours type of project.

Any project needs good planning, motivational force, supportive community, reliable tools and implementation. So needs your endurance race or weight loss project.

There are tons of training plans all over the Internet, some work for some people some don’t. Of course there is always a way to hire a coach as well. I find Strava Segments to be a fantastic motivation kick. But, when it comes to tools, I struggle to like anything on the market today. Yes, there are some apps, but I don’t find any of them useful or nice to use. There are some dedicated hardware tools like tri/run watches and cycling computers, most of them are A-okay, but have real trouble speaking to Internet or your mobile devices. It feels like those devices are from five years ago. In short: I haven’t found a training tool I’d like to use.

I decided to write my own training app. It is a big project I’ve been thinking about for whole year. After months of research and looking into competition I’ve decided to give it a go. It will be hard, complicated and relatively slow process that requires planning, research, time, tools and hard work. Just like Ironman finish.

My goal is to create ultimate endurance mobile training tool.

So, I’m building and an app. Not a fitness app, but a training tool.