A large part of creation is regularity. Consistently creating and iterating. Just making. Doing. Most of what we create is bad. Maybe that’s too derogatory. Maybe it’s better to say that most of what we create doesn’t align with our vision for our work. But that is the way it feels. And that is the nature of creating; we are constantly trying to make a vision realized. To create something good, we must first create something that is bad....
What does it mean to practice programming? I grew up practicing piano, cello, drums, Starcraft, skateboarding, competition math, handwriting, typing, Japanese. After college, I have spent time practicing Go, chess, swing dancing, meditation, and yes, programming. Practice is part of my life and part of the way I see the world. When I was younger, I did not always frame my relationship with these skills as “practice”, but looking back, it was certainly practice....
When is there beauty in tech? As a programmer, I see so much ugliness. Confusing UX, slow automation, unaddressed tech debt. But it’s also worth pausing and reflecting on when tech is beautiful, and I believe it can be. I find beauty when tech when what I want becomes effortless. When I can think a thought and have it become reality instantaneously. I experience beauty when I hop around text with Vim, when I type effortlessly on dvorak, when I submit a github PR the author responds, when I find a cool article on my phone share it with my friends on signal in two clicks, when tests break and I know why and how to fix them, when I open up a music playlist for the 100th time, when I open up a document and the formatting just works, when I program in Go....
I have always liked the idea of static-website generation. I even built my own static-site generator 10 years ago. But for this blog, I didn’t use that static-site generator. I used Hugo and I chose PaperMod. I chose these because they are popular, and well-used (and fast!) One of the painful lessons I have learned as a software engineer is that simpler and popular are almost always better. By choosing a framework that is popular, I choose something with known support and longevity....