As an amateur bodybuilder, I’m often asked by friends, family, and coworkers (other Software Development Engineers) what I do for dieting. I’m writing this so that I can refer people to it in the future since the process is a little hard to explain in detail on the spot. Also, I don’t think there are many (if any) that diet like I do and I’d like to share it. I think the diet can be used by anyone with weight goals and its different enough that it might just be what someone needed after trying other methods without success.

For reference, below is a before/after of the diet for my last bodybuilding show in 2016, as well as a full album to the show to establish creds.

Resources and links

Links from this session

• Feature description from Microsoft
• Github repository

These links apply generally

• YouTube channel
• Twitter account
• Why am I doing this?
• Subreddit for help and questions
• Github account for the stream code
• Topic suggestions

Demo

This is what we built. Here is the github commit. It’s the same thing as last time except the todo items are sorted alphabetically by a bubble sort that we wrote.

Demo

This is what we built. Here is the github commit.

Pilot Session Recording

We had the first stream last night. As planned, we went over an introduction to React building a simple todo widget. Below is a recording of the stream.

Reddit Coding Experiment

This post will be the raw notes for the initial setup of this reddit coding experiment. For some background, here is the original post that I made on Reddit.

I’ve been a dev at Amazon for ~6 years now and I’d like to start paying it forward a bit. I’m trying to reach people that are more or less in the position I was in about 10 years ago — playing way too much video games, not having a clue about where I’d be in the future, and never having been exposed to programming.

I recently stumbled upon some good advice that boils down to helping people who want to be where you are. Would there be any interest here (or perhaps, somewhere else) in learning to code via something like Twitch/YouTube live? My current thought is to do something around front end development (React in particular). For me, I needed to be able to speak and argue with people when learning so I’d like to try and provide that for others and doing this via stream seems like it would be the most accessible to people (and the recordings could help more people as well).

The problems

1. People are not exposed to ideas they disagree with in non-hostile environments
2. People do not know who to trust

One possible part of the solution

This is going to be a high level design review in public. Ever since I clicked on the Milo-Berkeley riot video on YouTube I’ve been fed an endless supply of partisan click bait. It has become trivial to maintain an enraged state today and I know that people I don’t agree with are being fed similar diets. I’d like to throw an idea out into the universe that I think could either help counter this or inspire different ideas that can counter these tendencies. One thing is for sure, social media and news outlets aren’t going to change the menu as long as competing for viewer’s attention span is the only way they have to compete.

When I start a new character I usually create a WeakAuras dynamic group for tracking its abilities. I ran into an issue while doing this with Totem Mastery on my boosted shaman recently since it gives the player auras with no duration, but I still wanted to track remaining time in a WeakAura. I’ll start by posting the solution, which involves writing a lua function that for a text display in WeakAuras, and go on to explain the weirdness behind it. It all depends on the UnitAura function.

function()
    -- For some reason it alternates between these two. Hopefully they fix this.
    -- If they do, then just remove all of this and use the right one all the time
    local totemTime1, totemTime2 = GetTotemTimeLeft(1), GetTotemTimeLeft(2)
    local effectiveTotemTime1 = totemTime1 > 0 and totemTime1 or nil
    local effectiveTotemTime2 = totemTime2 > 0 and totemTime2 or nil

    local actualTotemTime = effectiveTotemTime1 or effectiveTotemTime2 or ""
    return actualTotemTime
end

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There is no shortage of diet philosophies in bodybuilding. Ketogenic, Carb Cycling and Intermittent Fasting are some of the more popular ones at the moment, but that doesn’t mean that anyone of them is right for everyone. In this post, I am going to discuss the approaches that I have used in my prep so far, why they worked to the degree they did, and what I liked about them. I will also show side by side comparisons in most mandatory bodybuilding poses to compare the effectiveness of different dieting methods.

For those who are unfamiliar, this reading is supplementary to the Google Docs spreadsheet that I use to track the my diet. You can find the spreadsheet here, and I’ll reference it throughout the post. It should also be linked to on the right side bar of this blog.

The Standard Approach

Right now, a lot of competitors are doing some variation of Carb Cycling. You can do a quick Google search on it to learn more, but the basic idea is that you have some series of low carb days followed by some series of high carb days, repeating until you lose enough weight. The idea here being that you will go through periods of fat burning, and then replenish your glycogen stores so you have enough energy to do cardio and workouts. The length of a each series and the amount of macro nutrients (protein, carbohydrates and fats) varies greatly on an individual basis. This is the cycle I was following:

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I have always had a great appreciation for people who value teaching. For years, I have been learning from the private thoughts of people publicized through videos and blogs. Without knowing it, Joel Spolsky has taught me how to apply for jobs as a software developer, Sam Harris has taught me how to explain complex topics without complicated vocabulary, and Tyler Durden has taught me the influence our minds can have on our goals. Now, I think I finally have something that someone else can benefit from: my experience prepping for my first bodybuilding show, The Emerald Cup.

My name is Anthony Naddeo. I am a 24 year old Computer Science graduate currently working at Amazon and I finally have the time and money to start recognizing my goals in bodybuilding. Over the next 9 weeks I’ll be sharing my progress in the form of photos and data, as well as my subjective experiences with the process of contest prep and hopefully answering some questions along the way.. First, a little history.