One Breath – Kotlin and Breathing

A few years ago I discovered meditation and mindfulness and I’ve been practicing it since then.

As a side effect, I’ve been also paying attention to breathing. As I become more conscious about it I realize I was constantly breathing wrong. I didn’t even know that was possible!

I dived a little more into the subject and I found out that multiple factors such as stress and anxiety mess up with our natural way of breathing.

Breathing provides a gateway between mind and body.

Fortunately, the solution is quite simple. Resetting your natural breathing cycle can be done by performing a slow breathing exercise a couple times a day. A lot of benefits come with good breathing, just to mention a few:

  • Reduction of stress
  • Natural painkiller
  • Better sleep
  • Controls blood pressure
  • Increased energy level
  • Improves self-awareness

Why not put this technique into an app? I wanted to explore Kotlin, so I created One Breath, a very simple app that helps you recover your innate natural breathing with a simple slow breathing exercise.

It has only one main screen where you can set a few preferences and start a new breathing session:

  • Sound. Enable sound feedback on inhaling and exhaling.
  • Duration. Select duration of the exercise, you can choose between 2, 5 and 10 minutes.
  • Vibration. Enable or disable vibration feedback on inhaling and exhaling.

Once you’ve set up your settings just tap the dot in the center and the session will start.

Screenshot_20180212-001442.png

That’s all, please take a look at it 🙂 Leave a comment on how can I improve it and a rating on Play Store would be awesome.

Check the repo and feel free to contribute.

Posted in Dev

A Day at the Office

9:13 – Start. I’ve just arrived to the office with a friend with I share transport, leave my stuff at my desk and I head to register my entrance hour…. I know, it seems kind of absurd to me, I think flexibility is better, but it’s the way it is.

9:30 – Breakfast. I eat a simple breakfast right at my desk while catching up with some news, YouTube subscriptions, personal emails and start figuring out my goals for the day with the help of my Wunderlist.

10:00 – Coffee. With my goals clear I just need one more thing to get fully started: My coffee. So I take my Contigo mug (which is awesome) and take it downstairs to fill it with the elixir.

loop coffee GIF

11:00 – Work, work, work, work, work. I like to code on the morning. I start by fixing some bugs previously assigned to me on our team platform VSTS and continue with any other assigned tasks.

12:00 – Daily SCRUM. Just like this photo of the Jedi council but in a much less cool and small room, standing up and with remote attendants joined by video, no holograms 😭.

Jedi Council

 

13:00 – Work, work, work, work, work. I Continue with my assignments, create a couple of pull requests and review a couple from my team.

14:00 – Meditation. Around this time I try to free myself for 10 minutes to meditate. I’m currently using Headspace app to do my meditations. It really helps me with my stress level, keeps me concentrated and I actually really enjoy it, it’s really nice to take 10 minutes and appreciate.

14:30 – Lunch. My co-workers and I go down to the cafeteria to have lunch. My current company is located inside a University so we share the cafeteria with the students. I’m still waiting for the food fight.

15:00 – Chatter. We head to an open area in the campus to sit and talk about everything. Just relax and take a few minutes to talk about everyone’s life, movies, tech, gadgets, comics, memes, and anything that comes up.

15:30 – Learn. Time to go back to the office. I love to learn, I always have topics on my list of things I want to learn about, so I like to spent this part of my day in learning, currently I’m focused on Android stuff, specifically Kotlin and how can I improve the architecture in my projects.

16:00 – Improve. By this time I usually focus on our improvement project, this include tasks like collaborating with co-workers on how to improve our development process, our continuous integration process, integration of new tools, best practices… Currently we’re under a CMMI certification process so I have a meeting with one of my co-workers to review the progress.

17:00 – Closing. I close tasks for the day and focus on any short task so I don’t leave unfinished tasks before I leave.

18:00 – Finish. I register my exit so that HR can be sure I worked 8 full hours.

A Day at the Office.