One of the best things about open source software is the ability to scratch your own itch (and that it may even force you to learn a new language). Added a skips feature into the Rust-based habitctl minimalist habit tracker CLI.
I’ve mentioned before how much I like the habitctl command line habit tracker for its minimalism, simplicity, portability, and great consistency graphs that give me real information I can action.
Aspire to be a mensch. Be afraid to die until you’ve won at least a few small victories for humanity.
I was surprised when I migrated my blog and was looking over posts I’d written over the years to find I’d never actually written about one of my core goal principles every year: be more mensch.
Guy Kawasaki’s 2006 post How to be a Mensch articulated something I’d always felt but never translated well into words. It ended up informing a lot of my thinking about the type of person I wanted to be and legacy I want to leave, both in my life and in the lives and places I touch.
With Jekyll getting long in the tooth, and wanting to force myself to learn a new programming language, I looked at switching this blog over to Hugo or Gatsby. Gatsby won, but here’s what I learned.
While I still kinda lurv Jekyll, I’d been wanting to force myself to use languages I’m not particularly a huge fan of, Golang and javascript/typescript. A consistent (and accurate) joke amongst my staff is that I only really enjoy programming in languages that look like Ruby (Elixir and Crystal being the usual suspects here.).
Switch from goal-based approaches for what you want to accomplish to figuring out how to create habits and systems. Goals fade, habits compound.
When I look back over goals I’ve set myself over multiple years, what sticks has been the ones where I’ve been able to set up regular, disciplined habits and/or systems that have managed to contribute to their achievement.
This past year, especially, I’ve managed to do more of what I wanted to set out to do, and what I told myself were priorities at the start of the year, than I have in previous years. A lot of that has been about embracing habits and systems, rather than beating myself up on merely setting goals.
The command line still provides vastly more power and flexibility than GUIs for numerous tasks. Comfort on the command line is often one of the things that distinguishes great engineers and data scientists I know.
I’m often shocked when I look at other peoples’ desktops and see a bazillion icons in their docks and taskbars. A GUI app for every conceivable eventuality. Many of them, just shiny wrappers around very simple programs. This contrasts rather sharply with my own minmalist philosophy which has been as simple as three program icons in the Dock: Finder, iTerm, and Firefox (and in Solus, just Firefox since Guake is tucked out of the way, see below.).
With a Macbook 12" update unsighted in two years, and Apple releasing a revamped Macbook Air last year, I started considering whether my next laptop needed to be Linux. Surprisingly though, the issue became not so much Linux as the OS, as PC laptop hardware available. Early 2019, this is how I saw my options.
My trusty Macbook 12" 2016 has been a shockingly excellent laptop for my needs: ridiculously light (<1kg) with a bright retina screen and enough memory and storage to get everything I need done (8GB RAM and 512GB SSD respectively). Completely silent since it has no fan, and with the nice reliability side effect that comes from not a single moving part, my only complaints to date have been about battery life and a processor that could have been a tad punchier (though perhaps thermally incompatible with fanless cooling). I’ve been super happy with it (and do most processing heavy-lifting in the cloud anyway) so despite my initial worries about purchasing one in 2016, my complaints have been very few. More than three years with a laptop is a record. Laptops rarely survive 18 months under my cruelty.
This was my attempt to remix org-mode with my Taskpaper flow to try to get all the benefits of org-mode for note taking, tracking and being date-aware.
While I still owe Taskpaper a huge debt for making GTD effective for me, I’ve talked before about how it not being date-aware, having repeating tasks, and lack of customization, as well as it not being great for tracking over time, led me to try org-mode.
I’ve been using this hosting setup for three years now to make my blog fast, cheap, secure, SEO-friendly, and using commodity cloud resources to host it. This is the HOWTO.
I have to admit to being impressed with sites that load with preternatural quickness and a bit judgey about technical influencers whose sites take forever to load. Sure, devs are not designers and backend guys are generally not great at frontend optimization, but I still find it the littlest bit inexcusable. Add loading slow to not using https, broken links/images, or a site not being mobile responsive, and well… I think that’s borderline sloppy.
Want extra hours every day to focus on what’s important and get things done? This is how I carve out roughly two extra, productive hours and an extra productive day out of my weekdays.
From both Scott Adam (yes, the Dilbert guy) and James Clear (Atomic Habits), think systems and habits rather than goals. Goals are the good for direction, systems create progress. Habits compound, goals fade (or get achieved).
Every year I like doing a refresh on my Desktop tools posts 2018 here and 2017 here . I’m constantly tweaking and clarifying my toolchain to try and eek a bit more productivity out of my tools.
I’m still on my trusty, early-2016 Macbook which is now going on three years old, but I’m mow at the point I could probably move over to Linux with little disruption. Also, investigating ways to do things cross-platform has really added better arrows to the quiver. Strangely, now the issue in moving to Linux is finding a laptop as good, light, and powerful as the Macbook I currently have (and additionally, is fanless and silent.).