May 2013 has passed and there are many lessons learned this past month. To give you further context, starting this may, I officially work full-time for Digital-Media Development division of BINUS University. Previously, I worked remotely (plus attended weekly meeting, commonly on wednesday) for them for the past one and a half year. This changing requires me to move out to Jakarta and leave the comfort zone I have at my parents’ house in Bandung.

On living in Jakarta

1. Food budget is quite high. According to my Toshl data, I spent nearly IDR 1,500,000 on Food (including snack and mineral water). For the record, I eat conservatively. Sometimes I eat at quite fancy places but most of the time I end up eating at warteg.
2. Using busway is quite fun. From my place near BINUS Syahdan, I just need to go to the nearest Busway shelter using angkot (it costed me IDR 2k).
3. “Mall” achievement unlocked: I went to Central Park (thanks to my colleague Anthoni for taking me there), Pacific Place, and Plaza Semanggi. The last two malls, apperantly, can be accessed using Busway.

On working full-time

1. Support-related task takes time. Since I’m working full-time and available at the office now, I handle quite alot support-related task. And it takes quite time.
2. Working full-time feels like attending school again. Wake up early, preparing myself to go to work, get back at evening. Repeatedly.
3. Working full-time feels like a long wednesday. For the past one and half year, I only went to office every wednesday for weekly meeting since I was working remotely. Now I go to the office every weekday, it feels like a long wednesday.

On WordPress / work-related stuff

1. I started using WordPress’ XML-RPC API for fetching data from a website and display it on different website. The full requirement of my project is to enable user to submit a post from a sub-site but the post should be stored in a different-slash-centralized site using particular category (plus the thing i mentioned on the previous sentence). This is the thing we do for simplifying the UX: everything can be done in a dashboard so there will be no site-switching. FYI, you can also extend the method registered on WordPress’ XML-RPC API.
2. I tried mandrill for a client and it is quite awesome. In some extent, it can be used to enable localhost site to send email as well.
3. I created a WordPress plugin for a client which uses custom database tables. That was two lessons learned at the same time. For using custom database tables on WordPress, I recommend this tutsplus’ tutorial.
4. I experienced DDoS / brute force that can take a site down. Specifically, that freakin WordPress specific brute force which is intended to break in to your site using default admin username. Anyhow, here’s the temporary fix.
5. I tried using Cloudflare (free plan) on this site. So far, I don’t feel I have got any specific benefit from it. 🙁
6. WordPress’ default search performance is not that good. Hence, I tried tweaking Google’s Custom Search Engine.
7. I started learning and using OOP approach on my themes and plugins. It is quite fun, apparently. Thanks to my colleague Deni Tri for showing me the trick 😀
8. Always use appropriate data if you want to make a point. Always.
9. Use XAMPP for OSX over MAMP for local server on Mac next time. It requires more configuration (moving the htdocs directory and setting the folder permission) but it uses the default port so you can use Multisite feature on local server.

On Life

1. Take care of your health. Being sick is costly in many ways.
2. Your body has a physical limit. Don’t think you can do everything everytime. Learn to set priorities.
3. There are people who love watching others miserable. There are also people who think that they are always right and could not open their mind. Learn to deal with these kind of people.
4. You have to be strong in many senses as possible (financially, physically, intelectually, etc) so jerks I have mentioned on the previous point couldn’t mess with you.
5. Medium is a great place to find great thoughts. Quora does this job well too.
6. N.O.V.A. 3 is a freakin fun game. It is worth the price eventhough I got it for free (due to Gameloft’s discount season or something) :p

Well those are (some of the) things i learned this past month. What’s yours?