THE YO.LO REPORT 2016

Welcome to my second year in review. 2016 has passed, thing have changed so here is a quick summary of what I did, what I liked, and also some random stuff. Ups and downs, but definitely a great year despite the apparent chaos of the world surrounding us.

Yoann Lopez

Published in

YO.LO

12 min readJan 12, 2017

What am I grateful for?

I am grateful for having met such a wonderful and loving person: Manon ❤
29 years, 10,585 days, 1512 weeks, and 254,040 hours of (conscious and unconscious) gratefulness for having such loving and supporting parents. They’ve always pushed me up and keep doing it! I wouldn’t be who I am without them. They’re a bit crazy but hey! Craziness can be a good catalyser sometimes.
I am grateful for having such good friends and people around me
I am grateful for quitting my job at Withings. After almost 3 fabulous years there, it was time for me to go on another adventure.
I am grateful for having started to learn coding at Le Wagon. I’ve always wanted to learn some foundations of coding. Done.
I am grateful for sustaining some friendship despite the distance with some of the people I like the most.

2016 challenges 🥇

Learning how to code @ Le Wagon

450 hours coding or 18.75 full days

My first Marathon

I ran my first Marathon in Scotland along the Loch Ness lake. Wonderful experience for the first 20k! The scenery was just breath taking. After that it got a bit more complicated but it was nevertheless, a great experience 💪

Goal → Sub 4 hours → result → 3h53min 👏
Total calories burnt: 2916 calories or about (only) 6 Big Macs 🍔🍔🍔🍔🍔🍔
here are some pictures

Sports/Physical activities/Health 🏃

weight 𐄷

My lowest weight was 60.1kg on the 8th of December (last year was during August with 60.2kg)
My highest was 64kg on the 11th of April (last year was during May with 63.7kg)

Some noticeable facts:

I gained weight during my coding bootcamp (what a surprise!)
I lost a lot of weight during the summer because of my marathon training

running 🏃

I ran 149 times (with runs ranging from 5k to 42k)

Here’s the calendar of all my runs that I tracked with the Coach.me app

I ran a total of 1334 kilometers (63% more than in 2015) or the the same distance as a trip from Paris to Budapest (compared to a Paris to Munich last year)

Walking + running (tracked with Withings and Runkeeper)

In total I walked and ran a total of 4000 kilometers which is the distance from Paris to Yerevan the capital of Armenia

My highest walking distance daily average was in September with about 17,500 steps per day and the lowest one was April (when I was learning how to code) with around 10,000 steps per day.

My most active day of the week is Sunday with an average of about 16,000 steps and Mondays are the lowest in terms of activity with about 11,000 steps

Working out with Freeletics 💪

I did a total of 303 workout sessions with freeletics
I spent about 50 hours working out compared to 44.5 hours in 2015 (+12%)

Books 📚

I read 16 books or about 1.3 books/month it’s 3 less than last year (19)
I read 5733 pages or 15 pages/day compared to 7,064 pages or around 19 pages/day in 2016 (a decrease of roughly 19% year to year)
Here’s the list of the book I read:

My favorite books this year were:

→ non fiction:

A book about the fascinating life of Warren Buffet, one of the best investors of all time. It’ll teach you about self-discipline, focus, business, ethics, love, and so much more. A very long read but worth the effort!

→ fiction:

One of my all-time favorite. A book in between dream and reality. Once you dive in, you won’t be able to stop reading.

other facts about books

the shortest one was LSD : The truth About Acid with 76 pages
The longest one was The Snowball: Warren Buffet and the business of life with 929 pages
The average length of the book I read is 358 pages

Travels 🗺

Less travels than in 2015. I visited two new countries: Scotland and Hungary
Scotland → Glasgow, Edinburgh, Inverness (Loch Ness) and the Skye region

Hungary → Budapest only

Movies 🎬

My favorite movie was The Revenant

Why?

Perfect music
Perfect photography
Amazing landscapes
A very heavy atmosphere
Actors at their greatest

Movies data

I watched 17 movies (approximately 28 hours)

Here’s the list:

TV Shows 📺

My favorite TV show was…

As a geek and new-tech-lover, I could not not fall in love with that show. The stories are very eye opening when it comes to our relationship with technology and where it could potentially lead us. It’s also a great starting point to have amazing discussions with your friends. If you haven’t watched it yet, do it now! (Black Mirror on Netflix)

TV shows data

I spent a total of 57 hours or almost 2.5 days in front of the TV (computer). It’s about 30% more time spent than last year 43 hours.

My iPhone home screen at the end of the year

Some noticeable things

I’ve decided to delete the phone app from my home screen as I barely use it now
The Messages App is becoming better and better as more and more users get onboard with iOS
Hyper is one of my favorite app of the year! If you like watching videos but don’t have time to get lost on Youtube then it’s the perfect app for you!
In my opinion Inbox is the best email client out there for my personal use case
Notes is probably the best app ever and it gets better and better. It’s perfectly designed as it’s super easy to use and always there to catch your thoughts. It’s one of the apps I use the most!
The Camera app will probably disappear next year as I’m only using the shortcut from the lock screen to use the iPhone camera
Overcast: the podcast scene is skyrocketing and there are more and more extremely high quality productions out there, which makes a great transition

Podcasts 🎤

Here’s the list of all the podcasts I’ve listened to this year:

Reply All (Gimlet Media) → a show about the internet
Startup (Gimlet Media) → a show about what it feels like to launch a startup
Heavyweight (Gimlet Media) → A show about acting after you felt you missed something because the moment you wanted to act was never right. Well now it is!
The Memory Palace (Nate Dimeo) → A show about pure storytelling
Open for Business (Gimlet Media) → A show about small business owners
Planet Money → A show about…Money? Well no, it’s more about Economics
Radiolab → A show about storytelling at its best
Snap Judgment → A show about storytelling at its best (again)
Surprisingly Awesome (Gimlet Media) → A show about boring stuff which appear to be extremely interesting if we dive in
Twice Removed (Gimlet Media) → A show about how we’re all related and just a giant family.
The Family Podcast (The Family) → A show about advising entrepreneurs

Side Projects 📝

Happenstance

Sarah Marga and I launched Happenstance on Product Hunt (Check it out here) at the beginning of 2016. We have now more than 400 upvotes on Product Hunt! We get users every day without doing any marketing at all but the project is a little bit on hold as we’d have to re-build it from scratch to automate everything. Here’s what we wrote after its launch:

We created happenstance because we wanted to meet new interesting people, with no other purpose than sharing thoughts, ideas, and life experience. We had that burning desire to expand our world, and to discover the lives and adventures of other people we don’t know yet. Although internet is pretty great for finding jobs, dates, and old friends, there is no service that would allow us to meet some random people, who are obviously cool and curious just like you (and us).
With Happenstance, we want to allow everyone to meet someone new and different, but yet kind of similar. Maybe a teacher from Japan, or a student in Europe, or a traveler in Asia, or a journalist from Africa, or a gardener, or a dentist, or an archeologist, or a professional gamer, or…well you get it.

Unmakr

Kinou (AKA Christophe) and I started a project called Unmakr where we pick some iconic products, we tear them down, shot pictures of their guts and write a post about it. Here’s the article explaining in more details → Why Are We Tearing Everything Down? The Story of Unmakr. You can also follow us on Instagram 📸 here → Unmakr

The web archaeologist

A Twitter account where I’m looking at the history of some famous website/apps. Here is one of my tweets. You can follow me here

Music

My favorite artist of the year: Still the Beatles.

I’ve listened to more than 37,000 minutes of music on Spotify which is equal to 616 hours or 25.5 days of streaming! +103% compared to last year.
I’ve listened to 1,590 different artists and 2,625 different songs
My most-listened artist of the year is Keaton Henson.

A great folksy singer and songwriter I discovered not so long ago. He’s also a visual artist/poet who’s not afraid to try different techniques when he writes songs and melodies. Here’s a short biography:

Keaton Henson is a singer and songwriter hailing from London, England who was born on March 24th 1988. Since his debut in 2009 he has released three studio albums and been hailed as one of the most engaging and evocative songwriters of his generation.
Like all the best songwriters, Keaton Henson began writing songs for no-one else’s pleasure but himself. The son of an actor and a ballet dancer, he was making a splash as an illustrator before he was twenty years old, designing the covers of Enter Shikari’s debut album “Take To The Skies” in 2007, along with Dananananaykroyd’s first effort “Hey Everyone!” in 2009. However, he always had a talent for it, one that was constantly growing with every song he wrote, and after he wrote and recorded a song as a gift to his best friend, he was encouraged to put it online and share it with as many people as possible. Near the end of 2010, he was contacted by Motive Sounds Recordings, and released his first album “Dear…” with them in November of that year, but Henson’s big break came nearly a year after the release of his first studio album.
In early September 2011, Zane Lowe played Henson’s third single “You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are”, on his BBC Radio One show for the very first time, calling the record “one of the most special pieces of music (he’d) heard in a very very long time”. The response was immediate and passionate, and Henson’s devoted cult following started building from then on. Ever since then, he’s turned the modern music industry on its head, carving out a niche and a career for himself by releasing art and music while touring far less than many of his peers due to his crippling stage fright. Henson is an artist in the truest sense of the word, one operating at the peak of his powers, and one who shows no sign of slowing down now. For that, he comes highly recommended.

I started to track my music by creating monthly playlist. Every time I like a song a lot I add it to my playlist (even if it’s a song I already know). Here they are:

My favorite articles of the year

Fascinating articles by The New Yorker about Artificial Intelligence. Very long read but worth it! read it here

Last year, a curious nonfiction book became a Times best-seller: a dense meditation on artificial intelligence by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, who holds an appointment at Oxford. Titled “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies,” it argues that true artificial intelligence, if it is realized, might pose a danger that exceeds every previous threat from technology — even nuclear weapons — and that if its development is not managed carefully humanity risks engineering its own extinction. Central to this concern is the prospect of an “intelligence explosion,” a speculative event in which an A.I. gains the ability to improve itself, and in short order exceeds the intellectual potential of the human brain by many orders of magnitude.

Random stuff

In 2016 I drank 279 liters of beer (+87% compared to last year) or 0.76l/day → let’s assume that a pint is 5€ then I spent 2,790€ on beers 😕 that’s quite a lot. Let’s make it more painful. Imagine that I invested this amount on Berkshire Hathaway stocks (Warren Buffet’s holding) in 1980 when they were first issued. In 1980 I could have bought almost 10 stocks. Today these stocks are worth…2,313,000€. Mind blowing!
I cut my nails 39 times or once every 9.3 days → yeah that’s weird to quantify this.
My favorite quotes of the year:

Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.
“You can have anything you want in life but not everything “ — Ray Dalio
“Choose not to be harmed and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed and you haven’t been.” — Marcus Aurelius
“If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.” — Jean-Paul-Sartre

I launched a new model rocket to test an onboard camera. Not bad but the rocket wasn't that stable

To go further on self-analysis I started this new habit of writing my own Codex Vitae or “book of life” → Yoann’s Codex Vitae