It has been a moment since I last penned a post, though I have been working on stuff. I’ll write a bit more frequently going forward. I don’t quite have a cadence worked out in my head, but my goal right now is more than a few times a month.

I plan to dive into some of these a bit more, but in the past 8 weeks or so I’ve, been:

• Getting my first website up and running on AWS! (EC2 + Docker Compose)
• Playing around with openai image generation for a site logo (for the aforementioned site)
• Experimenting with the igdb api set (for a potential video games calendar project)
• Creating a django/react signup and email verification flow for future projects

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A few musings from the past weeks:

• Understanding takes time. This isn’t particularly novel, but I often remind myself that it takes time to form understanding around things I haven’t done before, and it’s okay to not know the answers up front when seeing something for the first time
• Consistency matters. Getting better over time requires repeated effort, and necessitates time spent doing the thing at the cost of doing other things. It’s not glamorous, but (hopefully good) routines do build habits, and habits do lead to forward progress, over time
• Output matters. In learning about how the web works (among other topics), writing code is often one of the best ways I find I form understanding, even if it’s just copying what someone else has written and perhaps tweaking one or two things. I’ve also learned that I will write a ton of things that do not work, thousands of lines of code that will never get used, but were useful in the moment for learning
• There will always be more to learn. There have been a lot of humans working on many things for a long time. At this point, there’s a vast ocean of knowledge and experience that is impossible to master because I won’t have enough time on this earth. It’s exciting to think there will always be something to learn about, to expand my understanding of, but it’s also a humbling fact to let sink in — time is limited
• Creativity is born from spending time understanding what already exists. Few things come from complete nothingness. Many things are derivations of what already surrounds us. Learning requires copying to experience and understand, to prepare someone to experiment. Breaking the rules (intentionally) means you have to know what they are well enough to know how to stretch the limits!
• Progress is not linear. This can be hard to stomach sometimes, but the path from point A to point B is, for better or worse, not always linear. It’s okay if things take longer or more time than anticipated – that’s part of the journey. In times where I get down on myself for not knowing this or that, I remind myself that these things are not easy and that growth will happen in fits and starts. What’s important is showing up time and again to do the hard things. Over time, the hard things become more manageable.

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Till next time. – 孤独を愛する人間