A thought in the back of my mind

2 minute read

I spent most of yesterday working on...

making tables of verb conjugations

I'm using a figma wireframe kit to whip a wireframe, finding it hard to make progress without an indication of where things should roughly go. Beyond that, I need to make at least one decent table view and move on. Will go over the MVP and see how far off I am - I can feel the scope growing beyond what I want and need to be careful.

I'm learning a lot, really understanding the value of paper prototypes to vet ideas and produce something usable. It can be easy to have a half baked idea feel full and then get stuck on the implementation.

I'm glad to do this project, I feel like I'm really getting familiar with a lot of different parts of development and honing my skills. Simple things like getting better with typescript, understanding react better, implementing apis, using figma wireframes. It's all making me better and, hopefully, more employable.

spent most the lesson talking about verbs

Had a good lesson yesterday (different day than usual). I asked a bunch of verb questions, to see what my teacher thinks about verbs regarding practice

• Irregular verbs are the most useful to practice and print
• The stem or the verb is called the 'radical', with many irregular verbs being 'radical-changing verbs'
  • eg with the verb "Comer" (to eat) you have: the radical --> [Com][er] <-- and the ending
  • grouping different conjugation groups together is useful eg all -ar verbs, all -er verbs, and all -ir verbs.
  • grouping verbs derived from other verbs eg seguir, conseguir, perseguir or ter, soster, conter.
  • Some verbs don't have all the conjugation: "defective verbs"

In writing this up I've since found some more useful sites

• English explanation of irregular verbs - https://www.learningportuguese.co.uk/guide/grammar/more-about-verbs/irregular-verbs
• A conjugation site I might scrape instead of conjugação.com.br - https://conjuga-me.net/

Small press archive

Silent army did a small press archiving mini residency, I went to the opening/closing last night and felt inspired. Talked about small press booklets as both object and content, how it's important to develop both. Makes me think about my minicomic practice and how I can incorporate things to make the object nicer. I wasn't too happy with my officeworks print run, butting heads with the flatness of lazer colour printing alongside poor colour choices. Maybe in my time off I'll produce a little comic, something to manageable. I've been sitting on an idea called "Hungry the boy" for a while, will see where it goes. Would also like to have a comic outlet beyond return.horse.

A big takeaway was some of the clever alternative paper stocks and formats, and the nicer covers.

reading

Found this recently, a good short list of things to ask about when I start interviewing - https://dominikbraun.io/blog/5-properties-of-a-healthy-software-project/

questions

From mewithoutYou's winter solstice, a question about needs and behaviours, a questioning what coping mechanisms no longer server their use:

does my misery feed a metaphysical need
That’s long since passed me by?