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others who suffer

2023-06-22

3 minute read

I could barely concentrate today, and I continued finding myself back over and over, hunched and tight on my bed with my laptop, drowning once again in the developing of a pomodoro app.

I want to roll my own webview app template, with a barebones swift interface for window management and passing some info around. This way I can make my app pompom (password is pompom) a tenth of the size. I need window management because I want to add a config screen, something with more information than can comfortably fit in the pompom window.

Chat GPT was initially tempting, and I used it a lot, but it wasn't the silver bullet I hoped it would be. You really need to know at least a little of what you're doing, and didn't and still mostly do not. Thankfully, with AI and by copying other people's projects I managed to get the boilerplate more or less set up.

At work I'm slowly growing an understanding of what I really need in my tooling, and I have a strong desire to do some brainstorming to come up with some creative solutions. I don't want a monolith, and I don't want something so complex as to leave anyone else joining the team or filling my shoes bewildered. It is fun and challenging to really thoroughly think about what I'm trying to do, and how I want to do it.

There are some readings I could do to help, I think?

I've just gone back through these entries and found on the first entry the readings I was thinking about: Folk (Browser) Interfaces and what he references - Tools for Conviviality

For the layman to build their own Folk Interfaces, jigs to wield the media they care about, we must offer simple primitives. A designer in Blender thinks in terms of lighting, camera movements, and materials. An editor in Premiere, in sequences, transitions, titles, and colors. Critically, this is different from automating existing patterns, e.g. making it easy to create a website, simulate the visuals of film photography, or 3D-scan one's room. Instead, it's about building a playground in which those novel computational artifacts can be tinkered with and composed, via a grammar native to their own domain, to produce the fruits of the users' own vision. - from the afore mentioned Folk (browser) Interfaces

This is really encouraging when I think about what kind of tools I'm trying to make and how to make them.

This is also encouraging me to get an eReader - though I'm yet to figure out when I actually can read nor how I can reflect on what I read.

Another encouragement: Skimming my first entry made me see how often I used to include quotes in my entries - let's get into that again.

A Voz Limpia

I went to A Voz Limpia tonight. Among many things it made me think about how nice it was to write really small entries but edit them a little bit before publishing. Not sure if we'll get there tonight, I've been away too long, but worth thinking about.

back to the beginning, with a quote

I was listening to The Future of Code episode with Jack Rusher today and thoroughly enjoyed it. It's got a plethora of footnotes, and I clicked through a couple just now.

One of them was When I Sit Down At My Editor, I Feel Relaxed by Matt Huebert. I love the typesetting and layout, but I'm actually mentioning it to talk about a different footnote that it includes:

We must ask, what kind of culture or subculture is the ‘well-adjusted’ person well adjusted to? Adjustment is very definitely, not necessarily synonymous with psychological health.” Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being, 197.

Being so wound up today, being so distracted for the last few days (weeks, months, years), I stress out a lot about being well adjusted to the system I live in. It's nice to be reminded that the pressures I feel aren't neutral or natural, and my struggles aren't a sign of any kind of disordered spirit but rather a discordance between my internal systems and my external systems.

None the less, for my own well being (so I can bring my bruxism under control), I am working on understanding both.

small joy

I've been really enjoying my home made foccacia and the potato and mussel chowder. I eat porridge every day too, and I go for my little runs. I get so much joy out of these small things.

listening to

Does Spring Hide Its Joy - Kali Malone

questions