Garrett Pierce 
Thu Feb 27
Update for February 2025
Written by: Garrett Pierce
I’ve decided I want to do a monthly reflection, and this is the first entry in what will hopefully be an illuminating series.
Following on from my last post, I’m happy to report bullet journaling is going well still, and I’m finding it very useful. I feel like I have accomplished a lot more in the past month and been way more on top of my stuff, and it has me feeling really good overall. I have days where I journal a lot and days where I journal just a little, but that, combined with a planner, has really added a lot to my life.
I have been experimenting with using different web development frameworks in Microsoft’s Power Pages, and made some exciting discoveries. As a result, I have become a pretty big fan of Alpine.JS, as it works super well in Power Pages. I also found that Vue works in Power Pages to an extent, and that has gotten me more interested in learning Vue as well, both for work and for personal projects.
In my free time, I’ve started learning PHP! I don’t remember what got me interested, but I decided I really wanted to learn Laravel in order to build an app idea that I’ve had in mind for a while, so I’ve started diving in to PHP. I have found the crew over at Laracasts to be excellent educators so far, and I’ve been having fun in my first few hours in PHP.
I started and stopped a number of books this month, and didn’t finish any.
I started the month by reading Ryder Carroll’s book on bullet journaling. I liked it a lot, and flew through it on my Kindle. I got up to a section in the book where he basically says “everything after this point should be read after you’ve been bullet journaling for a few months.” So I stopped there, as I had only started bullet journaling a few days prior.
I also started reading Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros, one of my girlfriend’s favorite books. The third book in the series came out last month and I decided to see what all the hype was about. I had also been in a speculative sci fi mode for a while and decided to do something a little different after that. I’ve been liking it, but I haven’t been moving very fast through it.
Inspired by Josh Scott on YouTube, I started reading The Practice by Seth Godin. I’m not 100% sure what to make of it, and I’m only about 60 pages in. It’s a bunch of little anecdotes strung together into a book, so it reads in a kind of disjointed way, and a lot of it feels very similar to each other. I feel like the author repeats himself a lot.
That said, I have found it somewhat inspiring for my creative pursuits, and I’ll continue to drop into it from time to time as I feel I need some inspiration.
Like many people, I have been obsessed with Severance lately. I wanted to read something that fit a similar vibe, so I jumped into a few short stories by Philip K. Dick, which scratched the itch.
This has mostly been a “going to bed” read, where I’ll go through a few pages as I’m checking in for the night, usually falling asleep after about 5 pages. It’s a great read, though, and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in baseball history.
I was obsessed with HTMX for about a day and a half. I read 20 pages of the book. Decided it was really smart but I didn’t need to read 500 pages on the subject.
This is the most recent read of the month, and the one I’m most interested in so far. I’ve been on a bit of a non-fiction kick lately, and as someone who is passionate about music, I have long been interested in Spotify’s impact on the industry. I’m not too deep into the book yet though, so expect more in next month’s post.
I think that’s all for this month! Thanks for reading.