- let's see if this works | created-at:: [[Jan 22th, 2024]] tags:: [[100daystooffload]] -

So if my calculations are right, I should be able to do the following:

This flow is a solid step in the direction of where I want to take this tool. With a little bit of tweaking, I now have a way to publish my ideas to the Internet the way that I want to. I want them to go to my own freaking website! But damn if that isn't too much to ask. Install wordpress? ghost? Yuck, why is this software so bloated? This has been a painstaking process in trying to make the most light weight experience for publishing your ideas, and the personal site is just the beginning. Very soon I will have this content being published to twitter. I want to take my youtube live streams, edit them here, and then share those edits. Man, this is going to be so cool.

- Connecting your body and your mind | created-at:: [[Jan 22th, 2024]] tags:: [[100daystooffload]] -

If someone were to talk to me about connecting my body to my mind a decade ago, I would have thought they were full of it. Regularly practicing meditation and now yoga has really made me realize how stupid you must be not to build this connection with yourself. Humans all have this incredible biological computer sitting inside their head and if you treat it as just that, a computer, it can do cool things. But in order for the computer to run at optimal capacity, there are some conditions you have to meet. Our bodies are constantly sending signals to us asking us to drink water, eat food, go for a walk. Whether we listen is another story. The western world does not put much emphasis on the development of intuition, as opposed to the cultural values of the east.

Yoga is not just a practice of stretching and strengthening your muscles, it also gives you an opportunity to develop an intuition about what your body is telling you. Can you stretch in that direction? No? What if you breath into it, what does your body tell you now. I am consistently surprised with just how much I can push myself in yoga by just focusing on the simple act of being and connecting with my body.

Being aware of what your body is telling you branches into all aspects of your life. You are you after all. Knowing when work can wait so that you can take time for things that feel more worth your time so that your body will thank you later is indispensable.

- What is a good refactoring task? | created-at:: [[Jan 20th, 2024]] tags:: [[100daystooffload]] -

There has been a part of this code that I have been wanting to refactor for a while. Patch on patch of this form has left this code in disarray. This code is actually quite important to this site as well. It is a general application form that leverages the power of Protobuf's expressive type system to generate a form a user can interact with. I have some ideas for where I want to take this code, but they haven't been a priority. The form worked well enough, until it didn't.

I went to use the form today to try to enter in some information and I encountered a problem. If a map was referenced in the form, it would not save properly due to how the data was being serialized and sent:

```

{ "key": "some key", "value": "some value" }

```

should have been

```

{ "some key": "some value" }

```

Because of how this code was written, there was not a strong separation of concerns, which was a concern. Since this is a bug that is stopping a critical flow through this app, I had to resolve it. There were 2 options: tack on another patch or rewrite it sanely. When I code, I have shifted over the years to favor the former. When you can afford to write a patch, it is usually faster to implement and you can keep things moving. Just make sure you leave notes along the way, future you will thank you. Additionally, writing a patch doesn't stop you from rewriting. It is possible that by going through the exercise of adding the patch, you are able to load enough of the code into your head to more efficiently rewrite the code.

I started with attempting a patch. I am currently the sole developer of this codebase and so far patches to this form have been able to get me by. Reading through the code to track down the problem, I realized just how deep the problem is rooted. To patch on a solution would be more of a dirty, dirty hack to get it working. I didn't even bother thinking all the way through how I would have gotten it working because of how complicated it seemed. The stars had aligned to give this code a proper rewrite.

I rewrote this code to be as functional and generic as possible so that it could be reused for different purposes. It has been a while since I have as proud as I was to write this function. I felt myself tapping into some distant knowledge I had on functional ocaml as I wrote this. The solution was elegant and exactly what I needed. Opting for the rewrite was not free, it took time. The trade of time for this code was well worth taking and future me will be very grateful.

- Today wasn't a 100% day | created-at:: [[Jan 18th, 2024]] tags:: [[100daystooffload]] -

Idk what happened this morning but I went through my normal routine and then something just hit me which crippled my momentum. I have learned that listening to my body and trying to meet it where it is at in the moment vs trying to fight the feeling pays dividends over time. I try to map the feeling to a probability of what it is that I need. Often this feeling comes from not having enough water, so I drank some water and took a 20 minute nap. I went to my bed with the purpose to sleep and not to linger on my phone. Waking up from this nap felt amazing and the rest of my day started to look brighter in terms of me getting to do what I wanted to do. Everyone's body is different, but there are foundational needs that we have to meet if we want to keep our energy up. Check in with yourself when you are feeling off to try to figure out what need your body is trying to tell you.

- Why aren't there more personal sites? | created-at:: [[Jan 15th, 2024]] tags:: [[100daystooffload]], [[personalsites]] -

It bothers me that more people don't have personal sites. In my opinion, we all do interesting things. In order to communicate the interesting things that we do, we need to provide others with an immersive experience of our world. Personal sites of designers and artists attempt to capture our imagination with an elegantly simple and refreshing display of their portfolios or wild 3d graphics. It makes sense why this isn't the norm, these sites take time. But people are willing to put in the time to build creative sites, as myspace and tumblr have shown. Yet, more restrictive social media sites, twitter, youtube, facebook, reign supreme.

I think there is a fine balance between sites that give you all the freedom in the world to create and sites that have some requirements. Maybe the solution is something that is more hybrid. You can have building blocks of content, a timeline of tweets, videos, etc. but the content is anything that you could dream of. Like a universal file uploader _and_ formatter. Themes would give people a starting point to express themselves, and a marketplace could emerge for people to build more visually interesting ones.

More thoughts to come on this :)

- Hacking Culture | created-at:: [[Jan 14th, 2024]] tags:: [[100daystooffload]] -

I had a call with a friend who was a hacker in the golden days of hacking. There were lots of exciting things happening in security as problems were unearthed, and solutions theorized. Over time, these problems that came up became solved. Buffers got compiler and runtime checks. SQL injection doesn't exist when you use prepared statements. XSS doesn't exist if you use React. The bread and butter of what hackers were poking at slowly shrunk as companies changed their development practices. This isn't to say that security is solved. You could argue that the world is more vulnerable than it has ever been, as a whole, because of the shear amount of technology that exists. The thing that has shifted security has been the "juicy targets" requiring more and more time to hack. Less people are trying to hack banks because there are actually a number of protections that exist. These checks don't stop someone from committing fraud, that is still super easy, but they stop attacks en masse. Commercializing security is antithetical to the core ethos of what it means to be a "hacker". Hackers challenge the status quo. They operate where the interface meets the implementation. They will understand things that no one in their right mind should understand. Driven by purpose and meaning a hacker finds and exposes what is possible. Their "exploits" provoke questions and our lives are changed as a result. I used to think hacking was exclusive to security, but I couldn't be any more wrong. There are so many hackers that exist in different disciplines.

- what i have learned about the problem i want to solve | created-at:: [[Jan 10th, 2024]] tags:: [[100daystooffload]] -

There are many things that I could be doing. I have spent a lot of time doing cyber security, I have spent a lot of time coding, maybe if I am lucky I could be a baker from all the time I have spent baking. But there is only so much time in the day. There are only so many things that you can get 10,000 hours of mastery over. And even if you have "mastered" it, have you felt good doing it? My attention wanders a lot during the day. "Why did those eggs stick the pan?"; "What if you didn't have to write code in Javascript?"; "Maybe I want to play some guitar now." It is hard to narrow in on what exactly I should do, let alone what I want to do. But, if you treat life like a game, you can start to come up with answers that are more "right" than others.

You are just gamifying your life. Your life goals are just the things in your video game that you are trying to achieve. Setting goals for yourself is quite tricky, especially at a time when there are so many goals that you could be setting. Maybe you want to do what your friend is doing, maybe you want to learn that thing you saw on Instagram, or maybe you will get into yoga this year. You can do a lot of things, but the choice is crippling. I think most people are paralyzed by the options and end up choosing none. There are no perfect life goals to set, they are different for everyone. I like to think of it as people just trying to figure out what their "art" is.

I wanted to get really good at bass because I thought that it would be cool to be good at some form of "art". My life didn't feel satisfying unless I had learned some type of "art". I was jealous of people I saw on Youtube who could lay down crazy bass licks, all the while feeling completely incapable of playing simple songs. But the jealously slowly turned into realization. These people have spent ungodly hours on this instrument to be able to play like that. Even if I had happened to have picked up this instrument when I was they did, what are the odds that I would still be playing today?

You don't just need time to practice, you need energy. You need intrinsic motivation that pushes you through the point where any normal person would stop, and then you continue to break through. To me, someone who practices that is an "artist" and it applies to anything. I think people think I am crazy when I say this but I tell them anyways "a janitor could be into the art of cleaning!" And why not? Maybe they janitor with such passion that it would make an Olympian look like they perform half-heartedly. Maybe the odds are low on that one, but hopefully you see my point. I started to rethink some things I thought about myself.

I though programming was too nerdy. I had spent a lot of my life being "too nerdy" meaning I answered questions in class or spent too long explaining things I was passionate about, I guess. And typical judgement on nerds is that they aren't valuable to be around, maybe their existence is so oppressive that you need to beat them up, who knows. This fear of judgement led me to always distance myself somewhat from coding. It was a means to an end. The job I would do to "become successful" by working 9 to 5 at a job that I will complain about every day, and realize there is no fixing the crippling problems of the company.

So I made programming my art. I decided it was the thing that I would spend an ungodly amount of time thinking about and doing.

I am so far down a rabbit hole, maybe this is somewhat coherent. If not, I am not sorry. It is your fault for reading until here without having stopped reading. Maybe you should have a better hobby than reading SHIT CONTENT. If you are still reading then you are definitely a masochist who HAS to finish what they are reading, no matter how bad this content becomes. I could start writing erotica and you would like it, wouldn't you. Jesus stop reading this. I know how to piss you

- Dogfooding | My app is OK, it could be better. created-at:: [[Jan 9th, 2024]] tags:: [[100daystooffload]] -

I think there are some really cool things that you get when you dogfood the thing you are building. For those who are unfamiliar with "dogfood", as it relates to the tech world, it means to use it yourself. I have not had much focus on the projects that I have been working on, and now that I am directly dogfooding the app, which aims to help me increase the frequency and quality of how I write, I am held accountable. If my app sucks, I will not want to use it, I will have to resort to another workflow for writing. If the app is good, then I have achieved my goal. I have tried many different workflows for writing over the years and none of them really quite "get me". I think something like Substack has come the closest, but it is still not quite there. I want to write completely free of distractions, but when I want to connect my ideas with other people I want it to be effortless. I don't just want to blast people with my ideas, I want to have feedback so that I can improve my writing. And beyond just writing ideas, I want the tool to help me identify prior rabbit holes I have gone down and surface them again when they are relevant. Browsing history is rich with this information, yet it is rarely referred to. Is the information not useful? I don't think so. Someone probably found some helpful resources on "how to program" when they were looking, but they probably opened too many tabs and the window eventually closed, losing their journey.

I want to help people discover just how awesome their minds are. We are all so incredibly interesting, we just need a way to communicate how cool we are with others. It isn't easy to do, being a content creator is a full time job, but I think with some better tooling we can all start to share more of our ideas.

- v0: a start | Building tools to help me think created-at:: [[Jan 8th, 2024]] tags:: [[100daystooffload]] -

This post was written by a [tool](https://github.com/lunabrain-ai/lunabrain) that I have been building for a while, and I think this is the first feature that is remotely helpful. I am writing this post in the browser and it is then going to get saved to the database. When I click the Publish button at the top of this page, then the post will be written to a file in LogSeq where I will push it to Github and link people to it from there. Now, this is so much more effort than writing a tweet, but the big difference here is that the content that I have written is saved to my computer first, so that I retain control of it. If I wanted to later access my tweet, I would have to use twitter. What if twitter is down? What if it goes away tomorrow? These are common questions people ask about online services, but little really exists as an answer. I don't want to build another social media site. I really just want to help people connect their ideas in a safe space before they publish them somewhere else. Maybe it does grow into something more social. I am going to continue to focus on solving small problems I have in my life with this app.

- just a test | a test created-at:: [[Jan 11th, 2024]] tags:: [[100daystooffload]] -

This is the post for today, lets see if i broke something.