2020 August
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It's August already. On Monday I'm starting my first day as software engineer at CodeYellow in Eindhoven. Quite excited about it.
Found out about hyperlink.academy and it's oh so awesome. Very similar to goals of LA. The people behind it are amazing too. Jared Pereira's personal site was a pleasure to read. So happy to read about people solving problems I deeply care get solved too. Personal Website Chats playlist he has on YouTube is amazing too.
Need focus. Until I get last.fm and other imports working for these look backs. Here is a song I have on repeat. Monetochka is great too.
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Want to build a version of Foam & VSCode Memo for Sublime Text. Sublime is my primary way to edit and in some way consume my wiki (when not using the web output (GitBook)). It's quite a lightweight and rather powerful setup but it can be much more powerful. Don't want to use Electron app for this kind of thing even though VSCode is rather nice. Sublime Text just feels much more pleasant to use for markdown editing at least. I also have unique binds that make sense only in context of markdown editing so it's a nice separation of Code environment and general purpose Writing/Doc environment.
Need to explore Sublime API. And VSCode too as I want to have more power over my environment. Got Xcode 12 too so excited to start learning Swift/SwiftUI too. I still can't let go of the fact that Ship GitHub client ceased to exist. It was the perfect GitHub client. The idea of putting important issues into Next queue is so so nice. So yeah, Learn Anything, new personal site, a nice blog with mdx & newsletter. And app my GF and I are building for iOS. And in the future a nice GitHub client to use on macOS unless GitHub officially tackles macOS. And of course the full time job at CodeYellow.
👨💻👩💻
I also started adding more notes to the wiki as part of ## Notes. Feels nice to extend the wiki in more ways than just adding links which is what I was doing for the past few months.
I wonder sometimes how much I preferred dark interfaces to light some months ago. Used dark mode for everything possible. And now I actually prefer light mode for most things. It does make it pleasant that switching to dark mode on both iOS & macOS is seamless and nearly all apps in both ecosystems support both modes. The future is nice.
Oh and one nice thing happened few days ago, Dan Abramov followed me on Twitter. It's the first person with such following to ever follow me and it's quite an amazing feeling as I look up to Dan a lot.
Writing out the above future projects I want to complete in the coming months makes me reflect on how broad my current goals are.
I also listened to an amazing interview with CEO of Loom, Joe. He mentioned how he does weekly CEO updates authored with Notion and Loom & it's awesome. Video as screencast format is certainly underused especially as you can playback video at 2x speed.
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Reading this review on 4 months working at BuildKite was amazing. So many things got right. 🌈
From personal experience, working in software companies is insanely stressful and all efforts by the company to alleviate the stress are very welcome.
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Want to have a nicer top of my mind place for myself. These look backs are that but I feel like my wiki is too rigid. Andy's web render of his notes is so so nice.
This wiki doesn't have any fancy features like bi-directional linking and I do enjoy having a structure to my notes that isn't just tagged points (like in roam).
I think I'll try to write my plans out here for myself, in context of my goals. I have lots of todos with due date set for Sat. But in short, I want to rebuild my personal site, finally..
- based of mdnext.
- watch this & replicate it for LA. Prisma/TS/NextJS/Postgres. Very nice stack.
- study Django in more depth. Also Mobx. Oh and I've been starting to read The Art of PostgreSQL book and it's nice.
- there is few other misc things like building latest version of Vimari.
Writing these out, reminded me of Julian's site. He writes these kinds of things in public too as a sort of review. Media consumption too. Only everyone has a fancy site to go along with it.
🎼 Tor is nice.
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So Vimari part is done. Nick has done an amazing job at moving Vimari forward.
These kind of threads of condensed knowledge always inspire me. Need to learn to use Twitter better.
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Drug Gardening is one of the best community on Reddit. Sadly I don't possess a garden yet.
Speaking of drugs, LizardLabs is one of the most inspiring companies to me. Synthesizing psychedelics and shipping it worldwide is the future. Just not evenly distributed yet.
4-AcO-DMT especially was an amazing experience. Sadly it's a bit harder to get it now that it was 3 years ago. It's such a shame that it's 2020 and certain substances are still illegal for purchase.
Netherlands I think is actually one of the nicest places on Earth in this regard but that seems to be changing 😿
Hopefully I'll get the ability to drive the change with regards to this. Alongside proper animal rights, renewable energy & proper education and medicine rights for all. Future is way too unevenly distributed.
Oh and Hive too. Doing synthesis is incredibly insightful and fun. Want to explore it when I get time & some equipment. There should be more Shulgins in the world.
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🎼 On the endless quest to find the forever focus background song
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Decided I will have two binds for songs. One for active focus and one slower one. I still need to make binds to swap the favorite focus songs easily. Now those binds are hardcoded into karabiner config. But yeah, Bonobo does some nice active music.
Music and coding, focus work is so weird. There are people who can listen to wordy songs and still get to do productive work. It's strange.
I refined my goals finally. It's still quite broad as there is one piece missing and that's Learn Anything. But they do paint a good picture of what to focus on.
Cannot wait until Tekezo finally releases new Karabiner version based off DriverKit. Boggles my mind that seemingly no Apple engineers use Karabiner to extent that I do. Quite sad even.
This new post by Brandur was a great read. It's my dream to one day to live in a place like SF filled with so many tech making people. Immigration laws are the worst. 😢
I think I'll start doing personal monthly updates that will include everything I've thought about, worked on in that month. I already made Substack for it. Gwern does the same and it's pretty awesome.
Will release the first entry in September as I am moving to a new place then and hope to be much more productive now with respect to my projects & work. Writing 'on schedule' is a great motivator to keep yourself accountable. Also the reviews will be aided by some nifty automation (grabbing GitHub repos made, getting log of commits, songs played), this kind of stuff. And be linked from here of course as these diary entries are just raw thoughts. Most people use Twitter for this kind of thing but I feel these thoughts are often 'too unfiltered' to be sent out to every single person's feed that follows me. I like to keep my Twitter use to more higher quality content.
One other little thing I want to build is an email client built primarily to consume newsletters. Spark does filter out newsletters, notifications and personal emails nicely. But the newsletters themselves, I'd love if I could get a nicer experience with a clear separation of top newsletters and other newsletters similar to what I already do on Twitter/Instagram/Reddit. Could be I could make use of Gmail filtering to solve this and still use Spark client.
Solumun is nice too.
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I do think if it's worth going with Substack for these newsletters or roll my own solution with Mailgun. But I fear that would be bad and most mails might be marked as spam for whatever reason.
I guess the fear is that Substack actually gets worse with time similar to Medium or just stops innovating (Medium still has no syntax highlight code block in 2020). So yeah, I'll just use Substack and in the worse case it doesn't really lock you in to their platform and you can move away if it gets bad.
Erik Torenberg is another Substack I greatly enjoy reading. I like how he set for himself to write something every week & goes through with it. On Deck Writer Fellowship looks very awesome too. Curious about what kind of things you can learn there from other great writers. Plus of course it would be so nice to actually know some great writers. 🙃
Just learned that Substack doesn't support markdown. That's quite a deal breaker actually. I think I'll just go with Buttondown due to this. The big thing I want is to keep everything as source on my site and then just distribute parts of it as part of a newsletter. Or essentially distribute some 'posts', would be nice if it was as simple as 'publishing' a new post with a git push. Anyway, will see, some newsletter will be setup before end of September.
Okay Buttondown even has API. It's not even close then, Substack is 💩
I'll make a macro to take the post I wrote be it a blog post or a monthly summary and publish it as part of a newsletter with near 0 friction. So nice.
As a note, Hillel Wayne does this for his articles. The main source is on his site but is also distributed via newsletter to all. With an easy subscribe action at end of all posts.
I do wonder if Buttondown will support mdx though. Google returns nothing, will have to try. Not even sure what kind of things I'll be using mdx for. I still have to watch all the talks from the recent MDX Conf.
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Lovecroft is another nice newsletter solution. 🤔
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Sublime Merge is so good ❤️
I need to learn Git more deeply. I feel like it has so many awesome features I don't use. This applies to pretty much every tool I use but still 🙃
As example git-absorb. Looks nice but I don't even know what git commit --fixup does. Never used it.