I recently got a downtime in several of my projects and so I took the chance to work on that one thing that I’ve been meaning to get done – personal website redesign. This is the second redesign of drebbits.com and I decided to come up with a look and feel that could represent my work and my personality somehow. I got fascinated with the idea of ‘Less is More’ direction as I am starting to realize about the massive noise we get everyday and how much our surrounding gets busier as the day progresses. This approach helped me weigh down what’s important to share and what are those that were deemed no value.

[Mac setup photo]

The redesign is straight forward. Everything is visible on the surface beginning from Works – the homepage as I’d like to emphasize that this is primarily a portfolio site, up to the Contact. I get to easily build this with Underscore, Sass, Grunt and flavored with Jetpack magic.

This is not just another redesign. It is so special to me as I finally have the guts to be a grown up and embark on an adventure that has something to do with setting up a server. Never done that before as that thing is scary and costly. But the fact that I made a career out of making websites, it is rightful to bring investment on the table and give myself the dignity as someone who knows what and where he creates his works. Luckily SSD-based cloud hosting is ubiquitous and each of them has advantages on their own. Primarily because of their ‘built for developers’ headline and quite a number of followers, I signed up myself with Digital Ocean. Surprisingly, they do have affordable packages for the, indeed, developers and are flexible if you need to scale up later on.

The ride on setting up a server (from scratch!) was crazy so far but I never expected it to be easy either. Digital Ocean has good documentation and community that helped me along the way. I will find time to write a follow up journal on this exciting discovery.

One last important matter though. With this milestone. I’d like to remind myself to always be thankful to my incredible aunt for being a huge influenced on me. She introduced to me the world of online publishing and ultimately end up with WordPress. She’s my savior that gave shelter to my online version for 5 years and patiently guided me in getting out there. Props to her with every bit of my heart!

Ive been trying to start exploring places away from my comfort zone but it’s just recently that I was finally able to commence my plan to travel. 

Our first attempt happened in El Nido & Puerto Princesa of Palawan.

El Nido

We arrived at our hostel midnight of July 10. But before that, we were in a van that me and a friend are the only Pinoys. It’s crazy. We’re still in the Philippines but felt like we’re not.

Initially I wanted to have the dorm type hostel; it’s cheaper compared to what we had but on our second attempt of booking, the dorms were filled. We reserved the private rooms instead.  It seems like when backpacking, being in a dorm type would give you a massive experience – both connecting with and sleeping with other people. 

In a nutshell, here are our amazing 2 nights. 

• Met Simon, Angela, Matt, Brad, Stella, Mauro.
• Visited majestic islands via our island tour. 
•  Snorkling that I got panic because of the water that keeps coming inside my tube. Not wearing life-vest and the water was very deep!
• The lagoons are mesmerizing!! No solid camera can was sucks big time. Thanks to iPhone anyway.
• Got to talk to Matt with awesome topics; from his past to upcoming travels and the glimpsed of the culture of the places he visited.
• In love with the sunset beach-ing. Sunset with a friend, new friends, a beer and a ukulele is my favorite part of that journey.
• I like Mr. Sun even more.
• Dinner night by the beach. 
• The very fun part was drinking with people coming from 8 different countries. And my mind that time was like “this is craaaaaaaazy!”.
• Head out and we brought the party to the beach.
• Got to meet and talk to Sammy, from India.
• I saw a lot of things on the beach party that I only see in online videos. Not the hardcore.
• and when you party in such place, Grow Up or Go Home.
• Got to talk to Matt about religion, I was bleeding secretly that time.

Puerto Princesa

This is the city part of Palawan and we went to few (touristy) places since our goal was to work remotely during our stay there.

• Bakers Hill. Foods to take home and European feel park. Missed to try the tamilok.
• Of course, the Underground (subterranean) river. Our visit there gives me more hope to explore the world we standing on.
• Crocodile and butterfly park and the Tribe. 

The internet sucks there though and El Nido has a way better reception despite being in the countryside of the city.

Overall, It turned out to be more amazing than how I initially thought of our adventure. I do have another one lineup. This time, it’s somewhere outside PH. Someone needs to really have a passport and durable luggage bag to continue the adventure.