To continue the idea of peace and meditation, this second section of Op. 148 is yet another piece to inspire the souls of the listeners and to create calmness.

The apostle Paul once wrote to the Philippians with his concern on this topic:

“Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” — Philippians 4:6, 7 (NIV)

I chose a soft registration so that the listeners’ minds can meditate in the sacred atmosphere of the church and get closer to God.

Jesus said:

“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.” — John 14:27 (NIV)

Sometimes we need to stop from the usual daily activities to take a few moments to meditate, to find the peace that Jesus gives us.

That is what this song is about. I played it choosing a soft registration of Principal 8’ and Flute 8’ with the hope to bring peace to each one that listens to it.

During the last couple of weeks, we had been working on some recordings featuring sacred music for pipe organ written by Bach and Louis J.-A. Lefébure-Wély.

I am happy to share with you this good news that the videos are finally ready and posted on this page soon.

The filming sessions were taken place in two churches in Oradea, Romania - Rogerius Reformed Church and The Descent of the Holy Spirit Church.

Thanks to @Stefan Jacob, @Dorian Corb and @Cristian Stoican for recording and editing.

For me, 2018 was a special year in which I accomplished many objectives and learned a bunch of things. Having the flexibility to work and travel is a great blessing. 🙏

Here are a few highlights of this year. ✨

My Experience in Ecuador 🇪🇨

Perhaps the most touching experience I had this year was living and traveling in Ecuador for three months (September—December).

I visited many wonderful places, met lovely people and made a couple of close friends. I learned a little bit of Spanish, enjoyed the diversity of fresh fruits and vegetables. During this time I was in contact with the Church and made the important step of baptism. 💖

In 2017 I travelled to India for 5 weeks. 🇮🇳 Finally, I took the time to write about what I learned there. As European, I tried my best to adapt to the Indian life as much as possible, eating what and how they eat, doing stuff the way they do it, visiting some nice places and working at the same time. 🍀

I was lucky because Bhargav–an Indian friend travelled with me and I had the privilege to be hosted for a few days at Suresh. 🙏

I made this video which covers a couple of highlights from India:

Summarizing, here are some things I learned during these 5 weeks:

I have a powerful ASUS machine which I use when I'm at home. I guess it was designed for gaming. It's quite useful for any tasks, but I often use it for expensive tasks using more resources (e.g. training neural networks). It got a fast enough wired internet connection, as well! 🚀

When travelling, I do not have physical access to my home computer. However, I do want to access it sometimes (when I work on projects requiring lots of computations). ✈️

The solution I ended with is to connect to it via SSH. 🔒

So, using my MacBook, I can simply run ssh -A ionicabizau@<public-ip> -p <port> and land in my home. There are a couple of problems, tho. Here is how I did it! ✨

Port Forwarding

Helping our fellow developers—or generally speaking, helping each another—is an important part of society. We all work and struggle on this planet, so offering a helping hand is always welcome. ❤️

It's been more than one year since started teaching people to code. I do it on Codementor—an open marketplace for code instructors. In general, we set up 1:1 live sessions and start talking. 😄 Then after we get everything fixed and finally both of us are happy.

What I really like about Codementor is that it connects a diversity of people around the planet. Each mentee is unique (cultures, lifestyle, accent, beliefs etc.), but they all have one single goal: to learn—and that's one of the facts that make us happy.

While I do teach people to do stuff, I keep an open eye on things I can learn as well. For instance, I learned how to use Firebase by working with one of my favourite mentees! 😊 Thanks! 🍰

I write a lot of code every day, publishing my code on GitHub and npm. Each tiny package I create does something, and in most of the cases it's a module which can be used in other applications. 🍀

💭 What is npm?

In case you don't know, npm is the default package manager for Node.js. Note that there we can publish modules which are not Node.js specific.

Its name stands for * need pray more* (or nuclear pizza machine, or npm's pretty magical etc etc).

Our job as developers is to break and fix stuff every day. Sometimes, some of us even do it on production servers. But during emergencies, they just tend to apply a quick fix which may not actually fix anything at all— in fact, it could even make things worse.

On some days, it works! But it's still very dangerous:

These things happen. But when they do, how can we address these issues with confidence and in the best way possible?