Young Hands Club

I’ve slipped backwards in my weekly summaries on http://younghands.club. I’ve actually been apprehensive about looking at v.py, and that it is beyond my capability. I wanted to finish the work and then speak up on ossasepia, and do realise that it is better to communicate, Diana has advised earlier.. perhaps more than once. Sometimes, I am just unable to say anything meaningful, or things are in such a state of flux in my head. This review and summary is an attempt to analyse the same.

Though I did revamp my workflow after a discussion with Diana, and that definitely helped me think better – I am still plagued by wanting to do something that could be indirectly related.

I typically take the effort to plan, break down things into tasks and even schedule them. I have all the tools and workflows at my disposal to do these things.

My first step in any project, is usually a project outline and notes, which become tasks as I move along. It seems like I want to rebel against the plan and still succeed. I’m constantly looking for a thrill, and to work with inspiration. Sometimes the inspiration is elsewhere, and on occasion I do not know if it is really inspiration. If not, perhaps it is that I manage time a lot less well than I think I do. To counter that, I can say that I have done more in the last 4 weeks than in a while. It is still important to remind myself that there is plenty of room to improve.

So, I often ‘stumble’ upon an obsessive urge to ‘complete something first’, with the idea that ‘a lot of other processes will be streamlined if I finish this first’. While the ideas are in general worthy and not incorrect or useless – they are usually not ‘easy’ like a quick fix.

In short, these excursions cannot be planned as ‘short distractions’, which I have tried. The chunks of time I put in seem to cover several days. My note taking has been sketchy in some areas. I am yet to complete publishing my brain dump. As I think backwards – I think I have added to these and more – almost every other day. A portion of the notes are on https://shrysr.github.io/docs/.

Beyond these notes are numerous projects which are stored as individual, private git repositories (Bitbucket). Some done almost to the end, and many barely started. Very less original work. For example, tidy Tuesday was one of the challenges I took up, which lasted only a week. I actually have a few more tidy tuesday projects outlined. There is for example,

• [ ] The planned deeper exploration of the UMAP algorithm is pending. I think that to be able to test the UMAP algorithm on different , its is important to be able create reproducible environments for them. This has to be done using Docker.
• Made significant headway in the Dive into Docker course. The notes are being consolidated and will be posted (as a blog post) which will be updated as I add to it.
• Wrote about needing to resize the swap partition in Linode to install the UMAP library. This was quite easy to do, considering the relatively painful experiences in the past. The first Linode I set up had a generous swap allocation from the start, and I forgot to do so in the 2nd (current) instance.
• Started documenting the effort to build a datascience docker container to aid in the exploration of UMAP and any such related projects.
• Gained comfort in deploying docker containers locally, as well as on the VPS.
• Connected the Business Science Slack channel to weechat. So I am running Slack in the terminal and it has actually been wonderful. I need to gain a lot more comfort in using weechat to reduce some pain points. I’ve actually started posting messages in it, composed on Emacs.
• Customised tmux better and learnt more about weechat. There was an increased interaction on the IRC channels of Linux, weechat, weechat-slack, as well as Emacs. For example : I got to interact with Technomancy on the Emacs channel, mentioned here. My notes regarding tmux and weechat have been rather sparse. These are the commands that I am most unfamiliar with.

• Successfully ‘indiewebified’ my site. I believe this is a step in the right direction. i.e making the website accessible to microblogging, and a customisable categorisation of posts and conversations, as my updated post archive will indicate. Anybody visiting the website, will get a better view of what I do, and I can post across networks. Unfortunately, this does not cover Linked in, but in general – my interactions can be viewed via the ‘Browse’ widget on the Side bar.
• Composed a little bookmarklet to reply to any post / website with a click. Several other bookmarklets are also used as mentioned in the article, making it easy to like or comment / ping an article and directly feed that to my website.
• Okay, as of now – it does stand on a bunch of chairs like indieauth, brid.gy and several WP plugins. It is not self contained like I had planned. However, it is also clear that the entire workflow can be replicated with some effort on a local server, and thus there is potential to ensure stability. See link for the list of libraries.
• More customisation will be needed – both with the org2blog package as well as the indieweb WP plugins. I can first define and then plan these side projects as I find time. Support can be found in the IRC channels.
• Received compliments from a fellow student in the Business Science university slack channel about having been helpful via answering queries. In the future, I intend to post my replies and summarise those as well on the website.

• [ ] This will be updated tomorrow. Sleep.