gratitude journal 2025-10-31T23:42:30Z

HabrThe official application for working with Habr.comHabr (Habrakhabr) was founded in 2006. The project is equally interesting for programmers and developers, administrators and testers, designers and technologists, analysts and copywriters, owners of large companies and startups, managers, as well as all those for whom IT is not just two letters of the alphabet.The application has the following functionality:> search by publications> view the feed of the best publications (per day, per w

Rain lashed against my apartment windows that Tuesday night, the kind of downpour that makes city lights bleed into watery watercolors. I'd just ended another soul-crushing Zoom call with clients in Brussels, their rapid-fire French leaving me mentally stranded on linguistic shoals. My textbook lay abandoned beside cold coffee - seven years of classroom conjugation failing me when accents thickened and idioms flew. That's when my thumb, scrolling through app stores in defeated circles, brushed a

I remember the exact moment my phone screen stopped being a mere tool and started feeling like a window to another dimension. It was a dreary Tuesday afternoon, rain tapping relentlessly against my windowpane, and I was slumped on my couch, scrolling through the same old social media feeds that had long lost their charm. My phone, a sleek but soul-less rectangle, reflected the gray skies outside, and I felt a pang of dissatisfaction—not just with the weather, but with how mundane my digital life

It all started on a dreary Tuesday morning, as I stared blankly at my phone's static home screen, feeling that familiar pang of digital monotony. I had been using the same stock Android launcher for years, and every swipe felt like trudging through mud—slow, uninspired, and utterly predictable. My thumb hovered over the download button for Creative Launcher, an app I had heard whispers about in online forums, promising a revolution in personalization. Little did I know, this would become a

It was one of those rainy afternoons where the walls seemed to be closing in on us. My four-year-old, Lily, had exhausted all her toys and was beginning that familiar whine that signals impending meltdown. I'd been resisting screen time, haunted by articles about passive consumption, but my desperation outweighed my principles. Scrolling through recommendations, I stumbled upon an app featuring pandas—Lily's current obsession—and decided to gamble.

The fluorescent lights of the hospital library hummed a monotonous tune, casting a sterile glow over my scattered notes. It was 2 AM, three days before the anatomy practical, and my brain felt like a overstuffed filing cabinet—crammed with facts but refusing to yield the right one on command. I could smell the faint, acrid scent of stale coffee and anxiety sweat. My fingers trembled as I tried to sketch the brachial plexus from memory for the tenth time, but the lines blurred into a meaningless

It was one of those dreary afternoons when the rain tapped incessantly against the windowpane, and my five-year-old daughter, Lily, was bouncing off the walls with pent-up energy. I had exhausted all my usual tricks—picture books, crayons, even a makeshift fort—but nothing could curb her restlessness. In a moment of desperation, I recalled a friend's offhand recommendation about an educational app, and that's how Fluvsies Academy entered our lives. Little did I know that this would bec

I remember the day I decided to tackle the jungle that was my backyard. It was a humid Saturday morning, the kind where the air feels thick enough to chew, and I was sipping lukewarm coffee on my porch, staring at the overgrown mess. Weeds had claimed the flower beds, the fence was sagging like a tired old man, and the dream of a serene outdoor space felt like a distant mirage. That’s when I downloaded the ManoMano app, almost on a whim, after a friend’s casual mention. Little did I know, it wou

It was one of those dreary Friday evenings where the rain hammered against my windowpane with a relentless rhythm, each drop echoing the exhaustion weighing down my shoulders after a grueling week at work. The clock had just struck seven, and my stomach growled in protest, a hollow reminder that I had skipped lunch in favor of meeting a tight deadline. All I craved was something warm, comforting, and utterly indulgent—fish and chips, the quintessential British solace. But the thought of braving

It was 3 AM when my world tilted sideways—not from sleep deprivation, but from the searing pain radiating up my left arm. As a 42-year-old with a family history of heart disease, every unexplained twinge sends me into a spiral of anxiety. That night, instead of drowning in panic, I fumbled for my phone and opened the health management application that had become my silent partner in wellness. My fingers trembled as I navigated to the symptom checker, inputting "chest discomfort" and "arm pain."

It was 5:30 AM on a rainy Tuesday, and the espresso machine was already screaming—a sound that usually signaled the start of another hectic day at my three coffee shops across the city. But today, the scream felt more like a cry for help. My phone buzzed relentlessly; three baristas had called in sick simultaneously, and the fourth was stuck in traffic. Panic clawed at my throat as I stared at the outdated paper schedule taped to the wall, smudged with coffee stains and last-minute changes. I wa

I remember the exact moment I realized that my career as a mechanical engineer was being held hostage by outdated software. It was during a critical client presentation when my laptop decided to freeze mid-demo, leaving me stammering excuses while sweat trickled down my back. The 3D model I'd spent weeks perfecting had vanished into the digital abyss thanks to a corrupted local file. That humiliation sparked my rebellion against traditional CAD systems, and I began searching for alternatives tha

I remember the evening I sat at my kitchen table, staring blankly at a children's Mandarin picture book I'd ordered online. The characters swam before my eyes—beautiful, intricate, but utterly incomprehensible. I'd been dabbling in language apps for months, hopping from one to another, each promising fluency but delivering little more than disjointed phrases that evaporated from my memory within hours. That night, frustration boiled over into something darker: a sinking feeling that I might neve

It was during a dim sum brunch in San Francisco's bustling Chinatown that my linguistic shortcomings slapped me right across the face. I was trying to impress my girlfriend's traditional Cantonese-speaking grandparents, aiming to order har gow and siu mai with flawless precision, but what came out was a grammatical train wreck that made everyone pause mid-bite. My attempt at saying "We would like some shrimp dumplings" somehow mutated into a tense-confused jumble that implied we had already eate

It all started on a rainy Tuesday evening. I had just wrapped up another soul-crushing day at the office, where my only creative outlet was choosing between Helvetica and Arial in PowerPoint presentations. My fingers ached from typing, my back was stiff from hunching over spreadsheets, and my mind felt like a tangled mess of deadlines and unmet expectations. Scrolling through my phone in a daze, I accidentally tapped on an icon I'd downloaded weeks ago but never opened - Renovation Day: House Ma

Rain lashed against the office windows as I frantically stuffed laptop cables into my bag, fingers trembling with residual adrenaline from closing the Q3 reports. 5:47 PM. The hot yoga class at UrbanFlow started in thirteen minutes, and my shoulders already screamed with the tension of back-to-back Zoom calls. I could practically feel the knotted muscles between my shoulder blades throbbing in time with the thunder outside. The studio was my sanctuary, but tonight, the ritual felt like one more

Rain lashed against the grimy train window, each droplet tracing a path through weeks of accumulated city grime. Inside, the carriage hummed with that particular brand of London commute silence – headphones on, eyes glazed, a collective resignation to another hour of suspended animation. My own phone felt heavy, useless, as I scrolled through the same three apps I’d opened and closed for the past twenty minutes. Boredom had curdled into something sharper, more restless. That’s when I remembered

For years, managing my home network involved endless moments of frustration, especially when something would go wrong. You know, the kind of issues where the Wi-Fi just drops out, and you're left scrambling to figure out if it's the router, the provider, or something else entirely. That was

It was one of those afternoons where the weight of deadlines pressed down on me like a physical force, each tick of the clock echoing in my skull. I had been staring at a screen for hours, my eyes dry and my mind a tangled mess of half-formed ideas. Desperate for a reprieve, I fumbled for my phone, my fingers instinctively navigating to an app I had downloaded weeks ago but never truly engaged with—Fruit Merge Classic. Little did I know that this simple tap would open a portal to a world where t

It was a rainy Tuesday evening, and I found myself scrolling endlessly through my phone, bored out of my mind. I had just finished a long day of work, and my brain felt like mush. I needed something to engage it, something that wasn't another mindless social media feed. That's when I stumbled upon Wurdian in the app store. The icon caught my eye—a sleek, minimalist design with letters arranged in a grid. Without much thought, I tapped download, and little did I know, I was about to emb