Getting started

Trying to keep up with my professional development by continuing to learn and (hopefully) finding time to build projects. My employer also requires us to use handlebars occasionally, so I'm going to try use that more too.

I have tried this blogging thing before but I ... left it behind? I dunno, I wasn't happy with it. I was using 11ty then as well. Anyway, I think a restart is needed. Keep it simple for now, and as long as I make posts, I can redo the blog itself whenever I want/feel ready to.

Things I learnt about today:

Web UX

• 🏁 Dark patterns are bad and ~evil~ (don't use them to manipulate users into doing things on your website)
• make your website easy to use so that users will use it (this makes sense)

At lot of this was focused on psychology 🧠. Though I did once find the field interesting, it kind of bores me now since a lot of it is just unfounded bs. Maybe that makes what I'm learning kind of irrelevant, but at the same time, the impact of UX and UI changes can be measured, so even if the theory behind what is being said is nonsense, at least practically, it may hold some truth.

Closures

I can't really say what I've learnt here since I just started. The main thing I took away from this was that it's possible for functions to retain a sort of "memory" of sorts, which is really neat.

I was kind of switching between topics today. I liked Web UX, but wasn't sure if I should invest my time in learning it right now, or even if I should learn a bit more about design first. Learning JS was interesting and felt useful and relevant, but it's challenging, of course, which didn't always help with motivation. However, I hope that if I keep this up every day I learn something, I will retain more of it.

Other plans

daily driving linux 🐧

I bought a SSD enclosure. I want to try dual booting a linux OS and using that more frequently, hopefully learning bash along the way. It's not that I don't like Windows, but I guess I don't like Microsoft all that much, and considering I use macOS for work, improving with bash would help.

creating a bible api 📕

and a bible reading tracking ... app? I don't know if it will necessarily be an app. Anyway, the first part I've wanted to do for a while. There's an excellent translation called the Knox Version, but only seems to be available either as a hard copy or in one place online. I think more people should be exposed to this version, and so I want to help by creating an API. Would also be a fun backend project.

Once that's done, I'll make a little frontend app.

work

💰💰💰💰💰 (I need money)

I've been developing with Wordpress for the first time ever. After using it for a week, I feel vindicated in my dislike of it. Perhaps it's because I don't have the experience with it, or I'm not familiar with it or the API, but it still just seems so bloated and convoluted and I just do not enjoy trying to use it. Maybe there is a good way to use it. I've been using Local to test it out, so at least that will encourage me to experiement with it more.

The above, and this blog, kind of seem like an effort to distract from actually doing work. But it involves web development, so that's a plus!

(to be honest, I saw some really cool looking minimalist unix blogs and just wanted to mimic their style)