2022 November ​

Came across Dropcode and now I am thrilled. The stack of Tauri with Solid is perfection. I was looking into Wails previously and had something working but Tauri seems to have a bigger team and support behind it. So time to learn rust.

Lots of drama with Twitter being bought by Elon. Not sure how I feel about it as some strange decisions are being implemented but will see. Don't think Twitter will actually meanigfully lose users but some certainly are moving to Mastodon which is slowly getting better.

Life been pretty hectic a lot and I find myself still unhappy about certain parts of my life even though it's a pain to give any emotion to my thoughts. Should learn to disengage and focus on what I love doing more.

In any way, I haven't been watching anything much, just trying to learn, get my life more in order with Height and starting on the more scheduled updates weekly. Still have to build that good habits app. Streaks is not cutting it.

Also I knew this before but I am so bad at making interesting and aesthetic photos. Don't know how some are so good at it. Like all photographers here are all incredibly good. Something about learning lighting and composition. And good editing. And actually taking a lot of photos should help.

Oh yeah, also started training daily. Just some bodyweight exercies, mainly dips and pull ups with leg raises. Just trying to train until exhaustion, maybe a few sets and that's it. Also need to eat a lot more. I am eating fairly healthy now with tea/water and eggs with fish mostly. No unnecessary sugar with my 3 supplements of vegan omega 3, vitamin D3 and Magnesium.

Also love walking with my dogs, found a nice field nearby and usually stroll around there with some podcasts. One with Andrej Karpathy was inspiring. Transformer ML models are super good and are being used and scaled by everyone in industry. Think they were first presented by Attention Is All You Need paper. Don't want to delve into ML yet though before I fix my essential skills of getting quick web apps and soon iOS apps. Once I learn that well with some more design practice, I can look into doing something with generative ML models.

Also one thing I've been trying to do more and more of as can be seen by this rather longish look back compared to past ones is to just be myself and write more. I have a few entries for past months I wrote in Day One as they were private to me. Journaling is very therapeutic. On private side I think my biggest stress if you can say that is just worrying about Rachel, who is my chocolate labrador who is 14 years old. She is amazing. And reading about how labradords who live up to 14 years old are an exception is not helping. So I try to spend as much time as I can with her. She actually gets sad when I leave so I try not do that. Thus all my time spending with my family in Spain. All's good though. Just need to write more code and learn.

Writing this out in Obsidian, truly beautiful piece of software that I just wish was open source. Will see when I can build LA up to replace Obsidian as that is the goal in the end. For now I am happy this software exists.

There's few people whose work I follow a lot of and just get so excited when they share something, I hope I become one of these people for someone. Here are some:

• Alex MacCaw - Worked very briefly with him on Reflect but lacked experience to continue. His work is outstanding and he is so pragmatic about building. Especially the focus of building out Reflect into a family kind of business instead of it being VC backed. Small team, big ambitions. Also he is kind of goals as far as life goes, can spend time in New York, can live on a boat. One day.
• Victor Pontis - Amazing person from brief interaction I had with him. Worked briefly on Glow Wallet. The team behind it is inspiring so as the tech and ambitions. Also Luma. Some software can be delightful and bring joy when you use it. Glow and Luma do just that. I think both tools have a lot of potential to change lives for better so I hope they grow more. I mean Meetup and Eventbrite look very outdated compared to Luma. I also hope to use Luma a bit once I start organizing events for LA. Need to do more things in real world instead of reading tweets and checking GitHub repos with occasional coding. 😸
• Ryan Carniato - Inspiring and actually life changing to me. I mean I liked a lot about React but Solid is just something different. All the best parts of React as far as DX goes but just writing Solid code you can get fast sites without much thinking about performance. I love love the component model and more recently styled components in Solid. Adding tailwind classes, when they get long gets kind of harder to read so its nice to just have clean component names with full power of CSS I can use instead of select classnames even if they cover many cases you'd expect to hit. In future want to get Vanilla Extract working, perhaps with styled components. Basically write my CSS in TypeScript in place where I write the styles now in styled components. Would be nice I think. But yes, Ryan and actually the whole community over at SolidJS Discord is lovely.
• Vincent Ambo - Met him for first time at NixCon. The things he is doing with Nix are super cool. Like Nixery and the code in Virus Lounge that holds code for Tvix. Want to understand Nix and Rust a lot more and use tools he built.
• Artem Tyurin - Met him in person and we talked at length about various things including latest updates to bioinformatics, macOS, working at Apple and more. I love love his journal. Quite inspiring to live a more exciting life. What I love most is that despite working at company like Apple, he manages to release some nice OSS macOS apps like Telik & Aqueduct.
• EGOIST - As mentioned, he made Dropcode which pushed me to Tauri for building LA. And he is prolific in terms of number of useful things he publishes in TS/web space.

Now that I started writing this list, I realize I can go for a long long time. One of the things I want to do as part of LA is a proper contacts handling. You can add contacts and share privately or publicly your notes on certain people, what you love about them. I think it can be nice.

14 ​

Sometimes I do look back on my life and think just how much of my life I wasted. I'm still young though so one thing that does calm me down is that failure is not inherently bad. Each failure I was met with, I tried to distill as part of my rules for life. I do need to do something about making it easier to follow rules I set for myself. Like with exercise, I still kind of dread it as it is hard. And I am still so weak. Slowly trying to do more and more though.

Certain things, I reached a kind of blissful workflow where tools start working for me so nicely. On both mac & iOS. Karabiner is so sleek and still no one even knows about the tool and just how powerful it is. It's my 'secret' sauce. Well until I do proper course on it which I hope to do on top of LA learning platform. Speaking of it, had this come up to me when I showered:

A topic connector for topics learned. Basically want tldraw like graph editor where you can drag topics from left side and connect with arrows in the editor. But until that, I need to build the infra for just adding links, Pinboard/Raindrop style. Rust will take time to learn, like even a simple Rust CLI with clap has so much complex code to get. derive and all. I have rustlings open in my tab with solutions. Will go through it all.

Also I got my archives from Twitter and Instagram. Will do other services later. Twitter one I'll try run through this parser someone shared and IG will have to write my own. I want to be able to ingest all kinds of data into LA for actual organization. Pixave is great but sucks I can't see the code for it and edit. I want something I can control, perhaps image management will be part of LA, perhaps its a separate app but I need to start working on this asap. Because right now being able to reference some tweet I saw last week is ultimate pain (no proper search even, no tagged linking). LA should solve this.

Also spyglass is pretty neat project. Can be handy.

stuff I need to do asap

I mean even images. I still am using Imgur for hosting images because I have an alfred workflow for uploading an image and getting a link. I need images running on my infra probably with Cloudflare. So much to build.

It's nice to be able to write things more freely here. A nice little space where I can say what I feel. What I am doing. What I am planning to do. The beauty is that only ones who truly care what I am up to will read this and can stop any time. On twitter, any little thing I say gets funneled to all my followers and I have some followers that I don't want to unfollow me. This has already happened few times and it did hurt. Although rationally speaking, I should really not care. Should use Twitter a lot more often and start building/releasing things at faster pace.

btw I might revise this later but my vision for a perfect look back software. Is basically what I have now in Obsidian where I just write things to a file. Only it will separate things by day, kind of similar to how Reflect creates a day note daily. But more improtantly, for a given month, the actual UI, both to what I write to and one that's published will have a chronological feed of my online activity for the day. All the tweets I made. All the images I posted on Instagram if any. All my reddit comments and posts, not like there is anything to hide there, my account is public anyway and I do have an alt for truly private questions/answers. All that chronologically in one UI. Would be dreamy.

It's mind blowing this doesn't yet exist but so as many many ideas yet to be built. Maybe one day with AI, the time it takes to go from idea to useful publication will shorten. It's already getting there with generative images and GitHub Copilot autocompleting more and more of your code. Super excited where that goes. On my part I want to build a global digital brain for ideas. First class ideas. Will be my task manager and once again part of LA. This tool will be insane once I learn enough Rust to actually get the desktop app more editable. One thing I asked around in Tauri discord, was that I can actually use Go still with Tauri. I just need to make the Go server, run it locally and have Rust call into local server and it can then act as a proxy to send stuff to front end via its commands. All should be fairly fast but that begs the question of maybe its worth trying Wails after all. It's tricky because Dropcode is basically the perfect stack of what I want and the dev cycle is actually nice because egoist is much better dev than me. So yea will see. Eventually I think it will have to all be rust as far running code on the client OS. Compile times are not too bad too especially incremental ones.

Also it's tough being poor, I need to visit a doctor but I am still so broke I can barely afford a doctor visit. It's bizzare. It's actually fascinating how broke I've been for most of my life and I manage to somehow get by. Like now I have 0.80 euro on my account as I wait for my salary that comes in 12 days. Fortunately I have some leftover food and water so I should get by. Only solution to this is to work harder and smarter and actually charge for things I make in my own time. Like thus far, everything I released is fully OSS and free and it's all nice but my god does no one will actually pay for it if they are not forced to. I do have some kind sponsors though already so not all hope is lost.

Anyway, had all this on my mind so good to have it in writing and see what will change next month, maybe I get enough money and visit a doctor and fix some health issues I have that distract me from properly coding / doing things.

Oh yea I forgot about one thing with regards to perfect look backs. It would be amazing to be able to specify a block of text as private so it won't get published but still be inline with your public notes. Like ones I am writing now. So as example I can add this as I write.

Walked a lot with Rachel. She is so cute. Love her a lot.

Only that part won't actually get published but as I look at my notes I will still have it. Big big issue right now that no software actually solves. I mean few apps even tackle the concept of journalling well. Obsidian is quite nice but it's not purpose built for this and not sure above use case can even be solved via plugins either at least not to the quality that I want. So yes, back to coding. 😼

One thing I am happy I did is make a code repo which I use to share reproduction or general pieces of code. Maybe I will sync certain files or folders to GitHub Gists with some kind of bidrectional sync. Don't want to manage separate gists as I want to avoid having to go to UI to edit gists once they are published. Code should always be source of truth especially when it's on my file system because I can write scripts etc. for it to automate various things easily.

21 ​

2022 has been described best for me by Louis CK's standup.

Trying to get to first release of LA soon.

One thing that helps me not lose hope is that I am actually lucky. I am not mobilized for any war. I am not in prison. My home is not being bombed by anyone. I even have some food to eat.

So yes. Can't be sad. Back to working. 😾

28 ​

Going to Netherlands to spend some time there. Very happy with my Repeat song playlist. Amazing for working. It's funny, I have 3 playlists for 'focus' playlists ranging from general focus music to music I get less tired of. To then finally the Repeat playlist. Listening to Shimmer by Nils as I write this.

I also did take MDMA analogue with dad, supposedly a less neurotoxic version of MDMA. Talked a lot together and had a great time. It's a nice little drug if you take it once a year with a purpose of getting to know people even more. Plus music is truly amazing on it. I didn't take any psychedelics for more than a year before this as I try to lead a more healthy lifestyle.

Speaking of healthy lifestyle, I am very excited to start my new skin care routine with my new morning shakes and supplements and generally super healthy diet. But more importantly exercising every day. Got all the routines outlined and all, just need to push myself to actually go through the pain that is exercising until muscle exhaustion.

Other than that, all's well. December next month, then new year. I think I have a good thing going as far as my planning workflow is concerned. Some things I do want to build still to streamline my workflow but I've been saying this for years now, really need to just release small actually working things, even if they maybe a bit 'ugly' at first. Iterate. Iterate. Release.

One thing I am truly happy I learned well through the actual years of writing this wiki. Is that I genuinely note down everything I found interesting in this wiki. I collect contacts of people I find interesting. Collect ideas. Collect genuinely everything and try to make sense of it all in making my own life better.

My network of people I know is quite small but then I didn't really actively try to grow it. I haven't been on any events in quite a while for financial/time reasons. Maybe in future I will. Would be nice to have close friends. There's many people I admire, too many to list. Should reach out more to people and make my current connections with people stronger. 🌈