November felt slow and a little disrupting, the kind of month where routines loosen up and progress becomes quiet and steady. It was busier than usual on both the personal and career side. I spent most of the month juggling learning, training, and keeping life in order. Because of that, my side projects stayed still. Not a bad stillness, but a deliberate slowing down.

This month was mostly about getting deeper into SwiftUI, playing way too much FC 26 Rush, showing up to BJJ classes, trying to build something small in Swift, and turning 32 with a sense of calm reflection.

Learning SwiftUI 🍎

I kept the momentum from last month and reached Day 30 of the SwiftUI course. This is probably the first time I stayed consistent without dropping the habit halfway.

I continued following Josh Kaufman’s idea on learning anything in 20 hours. It helps me keep the whole process light, simple, and more about repetition than mastery. I’m letting the concepts stick naturally instead of forcing it.

Building My First Swift App 🏋️‍♂️📱

To test what I actually learned, I started building a small fitness app using HealthKit. It is nothing serious, just a space to practice and understand how things connect.

Building something from scratch is always humbling. Every stuck moment reminds me that the point here is to learn by doing and not to ship a polished product. Even after years in design and product, starting something new still scares me in the same familiar way, but that is also what makes it exciting.

Starting BJJ 🥋

I also started learning Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu this month. It humbled me instantly in a good way.

BJJ feels like learning a new programming language. Confusing at first, awkward in practice, and full of small moments that suddenly click. It also made me realize that the calm I thought I had is only the surface level. BJJ needs a different kind of calm, the kind you hold until the exact second you need to explode with strength. I have no idea how to do that yet, but I like learning it.

FC 26 and the Rush Loop 🎮

Rush mode in FC 26 Ultimate Team became my main escape this month. Quick matches and the constant reward loop made it the perfect end of day activity.

Seven years ago, a colleague warned me about games that trap us in endless loops without progressing a narrative. I am now exploring how these systems are designed and how they create that sticky experience. It is interesting to see it from both the player and designer perspective.

Turning 32 🎂

I turned 32 this month.
I wrote more about it here

Birthdays make me look inward in a quiet way. I feel like I am becoming more intentional about how I learn, how I spend my time, and what I want the next decade to look like.

Stillness in Side Projects 🌫️

With SwiftUI, BJJ, work, and life happening at once, my side projects slowed down. Not because I lost interest but because my mind felt full. Some months are for movement and some months are for letting things sit. November was the second type.

The month of fall, refreshing and calm. The month begun with rain, easing the heat and finally confirming that summer had ended.

October was all about me chasing TwoStrauss’s tutorial again, learning Swift and playing lots (and lots) of games.

Lets start with Swift 

I always wanted to learn swift. The Apple ecosystem and its elegance have fascinated me for years. My first attempt was back in 2018 through a Udacity course, but I could never finish. I thought it was laziness, but looking back, I learned so many other things in that period including basics of design, data analysis, sql, python and R but never swift.

That early experience left me thinking Swift was hard, and that thought kept me intimidated for years. I tried learning again and again, but never made real progress.

Then recently, while building my portfolio in Astro (AI tools as Creative Partners) , I used Claude and Cursor extensively to learn along the way. That process changed my confidence completely and I realized I don’t need to memorize everything, I just need to know how to find solutions.

I even wrote a note about how AI has changed the way I learn and how it empowers rather than replaces. The same thing happened here.

Right now, I’m following TwoStrauss’s tutorial and using Claude.ai whenever I get stuck or need deeper explanations.

Play 🎮

Ever since I joined the game industry, I’ve started to appreciate gaming as culture and as design experience. This month, I wanted to see how console games approach design and how they balance usability with emotion.

I’ve been playing Ghost of Tsushima since September, and after a month, I finally finished the storyline (yes, the storyline, I know). The game was deeply emotional and it felt like watching a series that I was part of. The storytelling was compelling, immersive, and beautiful.

After that, I began exploring live ops in console games through FC 26, Forza Horizon 5, and another masterpiece, God of War.

Writing. 🖋️

I always wanted to write, and to tell stories better. I couldn’t find a natural flow. Whenever I did, I ended up disliking my own words. They felt forced, like cheap literature.

Recently, I learned about a principle many writers follow: write first, edit later. get the structure down, and refine after. That small shift helped a lot.

This is where Im using AI tools again, not to write for me, but to keep me consistent while editing as I tend to switch tone midway and the tools help me to keep the tone in check.

This very note was written in iA Writer (my favorite app — more on that later) and later edited using the help of AI to maintain tone and clarity.

Would that be called overreliance or vibe coding? I dont know. The goal is to use these tools to learn and practice, so eventually, I won’t need them.

September’s been a mix of gaming highs, building the portfolios, and unexpected injuries. Here’s a snapshot of what kept me busy (and sometimes injured) this month.

The Ghost

Absolutely loved the game, from story to gameplay and to the visuals, it was a treat for both the eyes and ears. I’d heard about it for a while, but since I didn’t have a PlayStation, I never got the chance to play. I thought Sekiro would scratch that itch, but instead it just reminded me how bad I am as a player, rather than making me want to keep playing.

Where the game truly shines is in its story. It sets the stage beautifully, helping the player understand who they are as the protagonist and how they should approach the journey. That said, one area felt a bit disappointing: the forced assassin missions with Yuna. The game spends so much time talking about honor and the samurai way of life, only to push you into stealth kills just because Yuna is scared :/.

The game initially blew me out by saying that it can start as a Japanese movie, where the characters speaks in japanese and I would have english subtitles. The game also had a Kurosawa style where the game is in black and white mimicking the Akira Kurosawa, Take that for immersion!!

Still, it’s far better than the Spider-Man games where you pay €50–60 to play as Spider-Man, only to be forced into playing Mary Jane especially during in heat of the moment (what in the actual hell?).

I’m still working my way through Ghost of Tsushima and plan to write about it in more detail later.

Finishing the Portfolio

Speaking of writing — since finishing my portfolio (or as I like to call it, my wiki) 12 days ago, I’ve been planning a bunch of posts related to it: how I built it, and what I’m currently learning.

Here’s one I’ve already published: Why I Built This Site , where I dive into the reasons behind creating it.

The Injury

September turned out to be a pretty testing month. First, I got hit with a fever, and then I managed to injure myself on a bench press :D. With the gym off-limits and long hours straining my neck, I used the downtime to finally optimize my ROG Ally — or rather, free it from its toxic relationship with Windows (read: I installed SteamOS).

I should probably also write about how handheld gaming devices are carving out their place in the industry, especially now that devices like the PlayStation Portal are being so well received. In the meantime, here are my physical companions that kept me sane this month (and probably will for the next few):

All in all, September felt like a strange blend of recovery, creativity, and play. Between samurai duels, debugging Astro collections, and experimenting with handheld consoles, I’ve got plenty more to write about in the weeks ahead and I pray that I write more :D

Spiderman 2 - The end

Even though I tried to keep myself engaged to the game until I complete, there were many instances where I wanted to move away from the game.

Sure, the game was interesting and amazing, but for someone who played the Spiderman and the Miles Morales before this, I was getting bored with the usual spiderman shenanigans, may be a bit of oxymoron I guess, What else should I’ve expected from a spiderman game? But after a while comes THE VENOM, and good lord what an amazing sight it was. The game took an extra leap from the usual spidey stuff and more into Hulk (or Venom) SMA-SH, Loved the novelty.

As a sidenote, I should prep notes while Im playing games to write better 🤷.

Redesigning the portfolio.

Well, this somethign that I come across alot, I’ve been working on this portfolio since december from the very basic version to this-multi collection, multi faceted, over engineered and over glorified blog.

It all started from a thought of having a decentralized content platform which would act as a repository for my knowledge and the content I’ve produced or should produce.

Previously, my site had two versions of documents, Long formatted and short formatted. I also tried to incorporate mastodon to scratch the need for micro blogging but then it didnt serve me quiet well.

I often have a requirement of writing contents in fragments and then keeping it arranged only for it to later be chopped down and refine further, and hence I thought of building… “Series”

I would use this series to write more about how I built this site, and the games that Im currently playing so that it would act as a detailed repo and then we can formulate notes or essays from it to talk about specific instances.

AI Coding.

I’ve been trying to delve into coding for a while and since I was learning on how to be a better designer (Not saying that Im a better designer 🤷🏻‍♂️) it was very hard for me to maintain both aspects of learning and hence I thought of focusing only on the design aspect.

But since, AI tools like Trae and Cursor emerged, its been helping me alot in learning and helping me to recall what I’ve learned.

So, after lots of attempts and tryouts I’ve built this site using Astro and React with the help of Trae.

Playstation

Even though I had many different consoles over the years for gaming ranging from the Gameboy era to Rog ally (which is technically a PC), my recent aquisition of Playstation 5 has allowed me to experience the ways in which controllers could provide a different experience to the user.

I'm in an absolute awe about the way it handles haptics and provides a surround system by providing sound through the joy stick itself.

Playing Spiderman

I’ve always leaned toward PC when it comes to gaming. More control, better performance, ability to mod things the way I like. Console exclusivity always felt unnecessary to me. Why lock great games to a specific platform is what I thought all the time and I hated that some consoles charged more for games than their PC versions.

But playing Spider-Man 2 on the PS5 made me pause a bit.

There’s something about it. The way the controller reacts to what’s happening on screen, the haptic feedbacks, the way controller produces sound on shooting the web… It’s hard to explain, but it felt right, just like the game was meant to live on that hardware.

I remember Steve jobs quoting Allen kay in one of his presentation as “To build a great software you have to build a great hardware” and the console exclusivity just felt like the same. maybe it isnt just about gatekeeping. Maybe it’s about building something deeply optimized, where the hardware and software are fully in sync. That kind of tight integration isn’t easy to replicate.

WOW, that sounds like my next post :D. Well, more on the holistic experience later.