Week 7

My Mum is 60

My mom turned 60 this week and we organized a surprise birthday celebration for her. Initially, she didn't want to mark this in any spectacular way when she told me about it. She just want to do it subtly until my other siblings heard that was going to be her 60th year and decided we need to give her some surprises. Behind her back, we organized some things to buy for her and things to do. In the end, it all went well and she was really happy and felt so good about it. In my culture, parents say prayers for their children when they make them feel good and this was exactly what she did when I called her to know how it all went down.

Most time, when I think about my parents, I always think about how to make them happy, be an opportunity for them to experience some of the things they desire or make them happy. In the past, we would strive for conflicting opinions and issues. But now, I'd rather see them happy at any chance I've got.

We got the keys 🔐

After so much anticipation, we finally got the keys to our new apartment. Mercy and I hoped and imagined this moment a lot to the point where we think we are already over-planning it. But it finally came when we were asked to come just a day before the official start of the contract to get checked in and then collect the keys. Compared to our current apartment, the handover was quite smooth and fast. In fact, we got our names printed on the mailbox and doorbell immediately as well as received the Landlord certificate on the spot.

I remembered my colleagues at work anticipating this day with me.

Tried WebContainers

I got the news about the public access of WebContainers - a technology that lets you run NodeJS in the browser. I had followed the makers (StackBlitz) of this tech right from its announcement but haven’t gotten the chance to try it out since it’s private. Immediately I saw the announcement, I quickly jumped on my PC to give it a shot. I’ve been on the edge trying to devise a cheap way of serving frontend assets for Laravel notebooks on PHPSandbox and this seems to be one of the ways too. After some hours of digging, I was finally able to get a little piece of it working with Laravel 10 - all node dependencies were installed and Vite was able to serve the assets. I was already happy with this until I encountered an issue on the last piece of the setup - using the Vite server within Laravel.

At this point, I ran into a deadlock caused by CORS and arrived at the fact that Laravel will use the public URL exposed by WebContainer to serve assets as opposed to using the URL to load the page itself. This means that asset loading will happen on a different origin from where the page is loaded. I tried everything I could to work around this to no avail. This seems to be a limitation of the WebContainer technology itself. If this is ever solved in the future, it will be a good and reliable platform to build upon.

Even though it seems WebContainer won’t be able to fulfil this particular use case for now, I already have some ideas for some of the things it can be used for as far as PHPSandbox is concerned. Some of these revolve around Language tools that are currently missing since we basically run everything on the front end for now. With node running locally in the browser, this changes the whole game and all those language tools can easily run in the browser without worrying much about the server.

Moving to the new apartment

Immediately we got the keys to the apartment, we started thinking about all the things we could do to quicken our move into it. Not only because we were very excited but because we want to make sure we put the soon-to-be-former apartment in the best condition before we hand over the keys to the owner - we just want to make sure our deposit is intact.

Since the new apartment is unfurnished, it is necessary to start sourcing the types of furniture we need. So, starting from the night of the day we got the keys, we started browsing Ikea and some other related stores to itemize some of the costs and decide on what will fit our budgets. After a lot of confusion and assumptions, we decided to enter an Ikea store and check some of the things we’d decided. About one week prior, we already visited Ikea just to have an idea of how things go over there, so, we already know where to go now that we are ready to move in.

We finally went to Ikea and were able to buy some furniture and got them moved to the new apartment the same day (all thanks to a prompt from a colleague at work not to use the Ikea delivery). We couldn’t find some of the furniture we need to our taste in Ikea so we decided to go to Hoffner also who is a similar company based in Germany. We were able to find the rest of the furniture we wanted and did the purchase.

Little did we know that buying the items is the easier part, moving them isn’t as simple as we thought. This was not simple for us majorly because we assumed we would find a place like MobelTaxi (the one we used to move our Ikea purchases) at Hoffner as well. Since we couldn’t find a mover at Hoffner, we had to spend most of our Thursday evening looking for a mover, one that can move the items we have in the current apartment as well as the new ones we bought at Hoffner - we asked on groups and messaged some of our friends. Finally, we got someone who offered to come very early before working hours on Friday. Accepting this was a difficult decision because we were both tired from all the walking around on Thursday evening and now sleeping late. We needed some rest before work starts in the morning but at the same time, we want to get this done.

We had to spend the night packing all our things, decoupling the ones we have to, boxing the ones we can and separating the ones we don’t need. We finally finished it and are now set to catch a few hours of sleep before the mover arrives in the morning. By 9 AM we were already at the new apartment with all our items dumped into the apartment and then set to pick up the other items we bought by afternoon all purchased items are now in the apartment all dumped.

After our work in the evening, we started with the big part - arranging and coupling of furniture and all our items. I’m glad we did most of this part together reading the manuals, making mistakes and then decoupling to correct them and getting frustrated altogether. We finally finished with just enough for us to sleep on the new bed around 4 AM and we slept to continue later in the morning. We finally finished all the assembly and coupling by Sunday afternoon and already felt welcome in the new neighbourhood.

After all the stress, I feel I won’t wish to do this every year majorly because it’s stressful and because of this we plan to stay here for a long time to have a stable living for the next few years.