A lot of times I had the idea of making a vlog, blog, daily journal or whatever you would call this. But I never ended up making it for some reason, most of the time because of procrastination, like every other thing I tried to create. So it's better start now than never.
It's interesting how my life can be influenced by YouTube videos, I blame you Hunter Peterson, thank you.
It is November 2º, 2023 at the time of writing this script, and hopefully when this video will be recorded also. My name is Gustavo, or Guz, whatever you prefer, and I don't know how many times I tried making this same introduction line in my other videos attempts.
It is day zero of, hopefully, a series of daily journals that I'm planning on making until... whatever the goal of my life will be.
---
If anyone outside my friend group is watching this, you are probably wondering who the fuck I am, and to be honest, I can't give you a clear answer. But if you are 18 years old, without having a job and/or without being in university or college, you probably know in what stage of life I am.
The next year, 2024, I will start hunting to get a job as a junior software developer, which wasn't what I had in mind some years ago. But it's time to at least start it and hopefully get my own home in the foreseeable future. My other plans of being more interdependent didn't work at all, because it is a lot harder to complete a project and even more to make it profitable than I thought.
Being the smartest kid in class didn't matter anything to what is real life, and be able to construct a routine and work-life balance when you try to be your own boss is not easy.
But you know what? I'm not sad or anything, at least I tried and there are lots of years in the future to try again.
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I'm going to be honest, the idea of making this daily journal was stolen because Hunter, one of the creators that I watched for a while, started to make the same thing for documenting the process of creating his horror film. Because I am in a stage where there's not a lot of progress being made, and because of a talk with my girlfriend, I remembered a dream/goal in life that I had. "Why not" you know?
This goal is to create a brand, or company, whatever it ends up being, I want to create a name that people recognize and know that it represents quality products, art and histories. The name of this brand is Capytal, and all other names that will be created under its umbrella, like SixSides, Elementria, Lored, Prata Productions, and whatever logo I end up creating. I want to create names, teams, that inspires and help people create good art and technology.
But I don't know how, I don't have money or people enough, and I don't know how much time it will take, and if ever this will be achieved. And that's why I'm creating this, because I need to start somewhere, and because there are a lot of things that I don't know I don't know. Thankfully, I have friends and parents who support me a lot, but I will not go anywhere if I don't start doing something to achieve this goal.
Anxiety and insecurity already made me waste a lot of time, and probably will still waste a lot in the future. But if I don't set any type of goal, I'm probably going to waste a lot more.
I know there I will end up burning this motivation some day, it is possible that tomorrow I forget everything I said here. And that's ok, I just need to remember to continue going on and on until I achieve something or die before I'm able to. Hopefully making this will help make me remember more often where I was, where I am, and where I want to go.
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Hopefully if anyone ends up seeing, or reading this, it can inspire you to at least try something. I know that everything I said was obvious, but sometimes even the obvious you forget when you drown yourself in insecurities, abandoned projects, burnouts, etc.
If someday this vlog or journal ends up being in a stage with the logo Capytal in the background, I know I succeeded. And if now, at least I know I tried.
But before everything, I need a job.
To end up, I would recommend seeing Hunter's videos and vlogs, it really inspired me for some reason today to make what almost ended up being some sort of manifesto.
Now I'm probably going to work on organizing my note-taking app again. Which I would really recommend having, it really helps on cleaning your mind to have to remember and worry in less things in general, but you probably already know that. I don't want to end up being some type of coach here.
Goodbye.
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- Written in November 2nd, 12.023
Today's artists & creative things
Music: Odisseia - by Lvcas
Something I started to take notice and remember to myself lately, is that I won't have a programming career forever.
Tunnels
Back in the old days, picking your job was a really life-changing decision, since most of the time, the career you started as would end up being the career you end as.
Professional journeys were like tunnels, you pick one and can't go to another without going back or breaking walls and causing chaos and instability in your life.
I grew up being taught this. Any decision that I made for my career and life was final and that I should damn well be sure about it, since I would waste more than 40 years on it.
However, things have changed.
Node Graph
Something I started to realize, is that, more and more, careers work more as notes on a graph. When you choose a career, you are just choosing on what node to jump on for the next 5 to 10 years, after that you will choose another note and path after it, or maybe walk one node back.
Yes, this reality doesn't apply for everyone, every country, every career, but it feels like it's applying more and more to more and more industries, and becoming less and less of a privilege I would say.
Careers like software engineering don't really need more than 10 years of dedication to stabilize and give you enough of a base to continue your life and take some risks. Also, the average on a company is just 3–5 years as far as I know, since companies in tech, a lot of the times, don't value the human aspect and tribal knowledge inside a company and software. Taking the decision to walk through nodes in the software engineering route, can still make you be able to work as things such as content creation, design, security, data research, etc. Since they connect in this graph in some way or another.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't focus on a career and dedicate to it. I'm saying that your current career doesn't define your life.
One big example nowadays is just the sheer amount of content creators that are "resigning" to take other career paths. Just today I saw a video of one of my favorite creators (LubaTV), is starting to step back from videos to focus on studying psychology and becoming a therapist.
10 years is already enough time to dedicate to something most of the time.
Dream Graph
I have a lot of hobbies and things that I want to focus on in my lifetime. Things such as game development, drawing, music creation, content creation, etc. etc.
Software engineering is a passion of mine, and probably will still be part of my life forever, but not the focus forever. I have a lot of ideas to put under the Capytal umbrella also, besides just software and art.
And I don't know when I will stop focusing on software, probably not any time soon, but maybe in 10 years. Just time will tell, but until then, I will try to have multiple dreams inside my mind for when I have the opportunity to jump on a different node.
This post was a lot inspired by this wonderful article: How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You) - by Wait But Why.
I highly recommend giving it a read, since it goes into a lot more concepts than just the ones I mentioned, and has a fantastic workflow/self-reflection exercise for picking things you actually like and should focus your time on.
Today's artists & creative things
Music: Split Idol - by GHOST
And since I can't control time, this post is being written after midnight.
Philosophy
In the past, around 3 years ago, I was really interested in philosophy concepts. Thing such as quantum immortality, nihilism, the concept of god. In conjunction with some therapy concepts such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
Unfortunately, I never dig too much deep into many of these, mostly knowing and searching about these topics on videos and some Wikipedia pages, and things as such.
But there is one philosophy that always stuck with me and I would say mostly helped me as a person: Stoicism.
Stoicism
Stoicism is a philosophy branch that is the most useful to day-to-day life, I would say. Being one that does not question things such as "what is God?", "what's the meaning of life?", "matter is made of what?", etc. etc... but things such as "how can I be happy in difficult times?".
I won't go on a full history lesson since it is somewhat of an old philosophy that has a lot of history, however, there are some key facts about its story I think is important to tell.
One of the first/main Stoics you'll see throughout time, is Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, considered one of the last great Roman emperors of all time. He wrote his thoughts all was a sort of diary to itself, making it very interesting to think about the idea that he constantly questioned himself, his being, his reality, and ended in conclusion that some times can hurt.
Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.
- Meditations Book X, 16 - Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
And on the other hand, one of the most influential and best Stoics, in my opinion, is Epictetus. He someone born and lived in slavery in Rome, with his real name being unknown to this day, Epictetus (epíktētos) in Greek is simply a word that means "gained" or "acquired". Funnily enough, the main Stoic teaching of him was that anything beyond our human control are external events that we should not "care"; we should accept whatever happens to us calmly and dispassionately.
It is not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters
- Epictetus (probably, I couldn't find the source)
But What is Stoicism?
Well, it is somewhat simple: If you can't control it, it doesn't matter; The only thing you can control is your perception of reality.
And of course, there are a lot of examples and interpretations, but today I will just talk about my own interpretation and how it applies to my life.
Sometimes I joke to my friends about how Stoicism is the philosophy of "I don't give a fuck", but that is oversimplifying a lot. This is mostly about remembering that you are a human, with human limitation; Not only that, but you are a brain, a conscience, that can't even fully control your entire body. The world changes and works with or without our input in it, and we have two options to deal with it:
Try to convince yourself that you can change it and that the world is specifically designed for you;
Or ignore it and remember that you can change just your mind and being.
Both are ignorant in some way or another.
Stoicism is about not taking things personally, and remembering that shit happens, liking we or not. A lot of times I get angry, scared, sad, for things such as my government banning a whole social media platform... but what can I reasonably do?
We all get anxious or worried about wanting to make someone else think the way we want them to, but can you? Yes, we can debate and change ideas, but we have control over someone else's mind?
It is Not Supposed to Be Ignorance
Even tho it can sound like, for me, Stoicism is not about not caring about anything else besides yourself. Marcus Aurelius was a Stoic Roman emperor, even tho he knew he couldn't control his population directly; Epictetus obviously still wanted freedom and didn't simply accept being a slave for life.
The main idea, for me, is putting a limit on the amount of care.
Fuck, I want to create a whole ass company, and I don't even need to list the amount of outside variables that will affect and could destroy this whole dream. However, I know that things can happen outside my control, and yes, I will feel emotions about them, but I won't feel them forever.
The idea is not to be passionate about it; "Passion" being used as a term for holding on, for feeling big emotions, for affecting your life and being because of something.
Stoicism, for me, is about not letting things that are outside your control determine who you are, what you will be, and how happy you will be about it. Because the only one that can determine it, is yourself.
You take action and responsibility for your own actions, and nothing else.
If it is not right, do not do it, if it is not true, do not say it. For let thy efforts be —
Meditations Book XII, 17 - Marcus Aurelius Autoninus
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There are a lot of things I would still like to talk about Stoicism, but I'm still learning about it and I didn't want to go a lot off scope in this post. This is a philosophy that really helped me through some rough times. And you don't really need to be fully Stoic to be happy, it is impossible to fully be one, but learning and trying to apply it on life can really help.
Show me someone who is ill and yet happy, in danger and yet happy, dying and yet happy, exiled and yet happy. Show me such a person; by the gods, how greatly I long to see a Stoic!
- Discourses Book II, ch. 19-24 - Epictetus
---
Today's artists & creative things
Music: VHS - by ZeRO
When I started my daily notes, daily blogs, whatever you wanna call it, one of the main reasons I started it, was because I had a dream, a childish dream.
I Was Lost
Since I was, I don't know, 13? 14? Years old, I had this dream of this brand. It was silly, it didn't have a lot of meaning outside the logo or name, and I damn sure didn't know how to create or grow a name and create useful projects.
As I grew up, this dream started to feel... childish, silly, idiotic, and just plain impossible to me. It is just me, someone in Brazil, in a non-special city, who can't even organize his own damn homework, against the whole world. I didn't want to grow up as just a gifted child who doesn't know anything about the world and just dream about making it better with the power of magic.
However, something started to be wrong. I felt lost. Creating learning and creating projects didn't have any real meaning besides just self interests. I started to create another brand to fill the gap from the old one, making something more personal, creating these icons that you see all over my profile pictures, but it wasn't enough, it was too... selfish?
I didn't have any motivation to continue.
Then, I Started to Dream Again
These past three years, I feel like a lot changed in my perspective. I found a lot of people wanting to create silly and small brands for themselves and their works, people frustrated with the current state of everything and the internet, people wanting to change things, found the Open Source Movement/Concept, the Creative Commons organization, started to watch people like ThePrimeagen and Pirate Software. Also, these last years I started dating, which really made me more confident about myself and happier in general in life.
The concept of "go create and share" just resonates with me for some reason.
So I started to dream again, I started to dream about creating that brand, that projects. I knew now what I like and wanted, and having this umbrella to put everything own, this name that hopefully can inspire someone... just fills me with determination to do it.
And I Know It is a Dream
I'm not special, I would say that I'm the opposite of it, I don't want to be special. This childish dream probably will never fully complete, and to be honest, I'm okay with it.
The good things about dreams is that you can make them as big as you want, and just enjoy the process of trying and seeing you coming, little step by little step closer to it. There's no reason to care if a dream like this will come true, because just in the process of trying to achieve, I will learn, I will create cool things, and hopefully be proud of it.
If at least one person find all of this useful, I know I'm going in the right direction. I'm not lost anymore.
And Happy Halloween also! Unfortunately, the timing and tight schedule didn't let me have time to do a Halloween-themed post.
Today's artists & creative things
Music: Late Night Walk - by Ichika Nito
Since I can remember, I have always heard about "finding true happiness", "and they lived happy forever ever, the end", "if you are not happy, you should worry", and you probably also heard of it, and probably know it is bullshit.
It is rare, if not impossible, to be happy forever, since it is biology. As human, we adapt to the current state we are, so if you are being able to progress in life, maybe bought a new house, or was able to get a job, or just is being able to get over the day-to-day and being productive, you will feel happiness in the start, but get used to it as time passes is this state. That's why a lot of people who were able to achieve their dreams, can feel lost or even sad about it after, since the progress, the curve of happiness, will flatten after some point, and you end without anything to fill that gap again. I felt this a lot of times in my short life, and it took some time to know why I wasn't feeling happy.
Achieving your goals will be fulfilling, you will feel happy, but it will flatten as it is achieved. It will probably end up boring.
Unfortunately, even when I was able to keep growing, like in this year, boredom was something frequent. This year was great for me, I finally started my dream brand, my projects are taking shape and being done, I finally have an actual job and salary, and this daily blog is being something consistent in my life. However, I got used to it, thinking about these achievements don't really make me feel happy, even tho I'm proud of myself, I mostly feel nothing. And I'm kinda okay with it, I finally understand that unending happiness is just a myth, and that I should feel more things.
True Feelings
Growing up, I was always indirectly toughed that feeling anything besides happiness is bad. I should never feel bored in my life; I should never feel anger; envy; I shouldn't feel sadness; and dear god if I cried when I am a man! Man don't cry!
No, they cry, they should fucking cry.
It was hard to kinda accept it, but not gonna lie, I feel better feeling more emotions than just happiness. You should, generally, feel all emotions in the emotions' spectrum, from anger to peace, from sadness to happiness, feel them, don't repress them. And yes, you don't necessarily need to seek them to have a better person, but a little I would recommend (of course, if you are sad you aren't supposed to seek feeling more sad, if that isn't obvious).
Something that I do time to time, is getting some songs, and actually listen to them. I mostly do this when I, like previously said, feel bored. I get some songs, sit on the carpet of my room, with just the lights of my monitor illuminating my room, and I focus on the songs.
And you know what I feel with the songs? Everything. I cry when a good guitar solo on a sad song until my eyes turn red, like with The Loneliest by Måneskin; Or start to dance and feel a small nostalgia for when I listened Novocaine by The Unlikely Candidates going to school; I feel dread and fear of the future with songs such as Welcome To The Internet; Or a strange peace with That Funny Feeling, both by Bo Burnham.
Because feeling just happy is boring.
True Life
One of the other main reasons I seek feelings with art and music, is that my day-to-day is and forever will be monotonous.
Trying to organize your life, will probably make you end up having a routine of some sort, which by the definition, will make your day-to-day be repetitive. Repetitive days are of course, not dopamine inducing. I always grew thinking that a fulfilling life is one that you do something different every day, and even tho having adventures and doing different thing is fulfilling in the short term, it probably won't be if you are focusing on something bigger. Yes, making the progress and work entertaining and valuing the in-between is great, but most projects will have some sort of repetitiveness or standard on the daily liking it or not. My main/current profession/focus which is programming is in some sense different each day, since problems and the code you will write to solve them will be mostly always different, but I can't go away from the repetitiveness of the same keywords, patterns, language, and way of solving problems.
If you saw my day-to-day, you would be probably bored, since it is mostly just:
Wake up;
Make up my bed and brush my teeth;
Get some coffee and check my emails;
Go to the computer and do some tasks for my job;
Lunch;
Daily meeting;
Do some tasks for my own projects;
Finish the working day;
Have some resting hours, maybe passing time with my partner;
Write the daily blog;
Go to bed.
That's pretty much how I would summarize the day-to-day. Do I feel anything special during the day? Nop. Do I feel happiness in the day? Mostly no. I feel nothing.
However, this was the routine that made me be able to have progress in my projects, was the routine that made me have a job, that is making me hopefully a better person and more close to achieve my dreams. And knowing that makes me happy when I think about it, but someone from the outside wouldn't feel the same, neither do I most of the time.
Because, a happy life is boring. And I'm happy having a boring life.
Today's artists & creative things
Music: ピノキオピー - きみも悪い人でよかった feat. 初音ミク / I'm glad you're evil too - by ピノキオピー PINOCCHIOP OFFICIAL CHANNEL
I cried at this song when I heard it for the first time, this is a masterpiece.
This is probably the best thing I added to my daily notes.
What?
This is a routine heatmap. The simple explanation is that is shows how many tasks related to my routine I have done in that day, the brighter, the more tasks.
Why?
One of the things that I found is that I'm very easily insecure about myself. Even if I'm doing fine and working on the things that I like, I still have days when I almost forget everything and start doubting myself over and over thinking that I'm not doing enough. This situation happened to me a lot over the previous year, and because of the amount of pressure I placed in myself in these attacks, I started to just feel demotivated and started to stagnate. I never could really prove to myself.
And then I found about this concept, I don't know where or when necessarily, but it was about having data to prove to your own brain that you are supposed to be fine, have palpable methods to convince yourself. Not only having proof, but also, having constant feedback if you are doing fine or if you need to actually question and do a course correction.
This map, this calendar, is what proves to myself that I'm doing fine and that I am improving. Every single day I look into it since it is on my daily notes, and I can see if there are any worries or not, there's no reason anymore to doubt myself as much. Even tho not all days are the brightness, mostly because they are based on the current amount of tasks of the current routine, I can't say to myself that I'm not trying. If any of these days there is a strange black void, I can just click into it, and go back memory lane to remember.
Also, the instant feedback is great. Since I know how the brightness is calculated and that it cares about the percentage of tasks of the current routine, I don't really care that much about older cells, but I do care if some pattern start to arrive in the recent ones. Like the stripe in the first quarter of the year, when I was helping my family and wasn't able to work that much, and the brightness of the last half of the year, when I got a job and organized better my work.
And as a bonus, this map also helps me know where I am in the year. Since I do Quarterly Themes, somewhat aligned with the year seasons, having a visual clue to know what quarter I am, even more when the seasons don't affect that much the look of the ambient outside home, really helps. This clue is not only via the amount of days that passed in the calendar, but also it's color:
Red for summer, quarter one:
Red for autumn, quarter two:
Blue for winter, quarter three:
Green for spring, quarter four:
How?
I don't really know how much it is possible in other note-taking apps, but in Obisdian is kinda simple if you know a little about scripting. It uses just two plugins: Obsidian Dataview and Heatmap Calendar for Obsidian. The Dataview script used is this:
In summary, the steps are:
Get all daily notes of this year (The year value is added via the file template);
Loop over all daily notes:
Get all completed tasks of note;
Calculate the percentage of completed tasks;
Push the day entry to the calendar data, with the correct color (The value "season-spring" is put by the template).
Render the Heatmap Calendar using the function provided by the plugin.
The source code of the daily note template is available on my vault template repository.
Today's artists & creative things
Music: I Gave Everything - by Connor Price
Something I started to notice and think about, is how much most good code is kinda boring.
Clever Code
Go (or "Golang" for SEO friendliness) is my third or fourth programming language that I learned, and it is somewhat a new paradigm for me.
My first language was Java, famous for its Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) paradigms and features. I learned it for game development, which is somewhat okay with Java, and to be honest, I hardly remember how it was. However, I learned from others how much OOP can get out of control and be a nightmare with inheritance inside inheritance inside inheritance.
And then I learned JavaScript after some years... fucking god. But being honest, in the start JS was a blast, and I still think it is a good language... for the browser. If you start to go outside from the standard vanilla JavaScript, things start to be clever. In an engineering view, the ecosystem is really powerful, things such as JSX and all the frameworks that use it, the compilers for Vue and Svelte, and the whole bundling, and splitting, and transpiling of Rollup, ESBuild, Vite and using TypeScript, to compile a language to another, that will have a build process, all of this, for an interpreted language... it is a marvel of engineering, but it is just too much.
Finally, I learned Rust... which I kinda like it. I didn't really make a big project with it, just a small CLI for manipulating markdown, which was nice and when I found a good solution for converting Markdown AST to NPF it was a big hit of dopamine because it was really elegant. However, nowadays, I do feel like it is having the same problems of JavaScript. Macros are a good feature, but end up being the go-to solution when you simply can't make the code "look pretty"; or having to use a library to anything a little more complex; or having to deal with lifetimes. And if you want to do anything a little more complex "the Rust way", you will easily do head to head with a wall of skill-issues. I still love it and its complexity, and for things like compiler and transpilers it feels like a good shot.
Going Go
This year I started to learn Go (or "Golang" for SEO friendliness), and it has being kinda awesome.
Go is kinda like Python in its learning curve, and it is somewhat like C but without all the needing of handling memory and needing to create complex data structured from scratch. And I have never really loved it, but never really hated it, since it is mostly just boring and simple.
There are no macros or magic syntax. No pattern matching on types, since you can just use a switch statement. You don't have to worry a lot about packages, since the standard library will cover you up to 80% of features. If you need a package, you don't need to worry about a centralized registry to upload and the security vulnerability of a single failure point, all packages are just Git repositories that you import and that's it. And no file management, since it just uses the file system for packages and imports.
And it feels like Go pretty much made all the obvious decisions that make sense, and you mostly never question or care about them, because they don't annoy you. The syntax doesn't get into your way. And in the end you just end up comparing to other languages' features, saying to yourself "man... we could save some lines here" knowing damn well it's not worth it. It's boring.
You write code, make your feature be completed in some hours, and compile it with go build. And run the binary, and it's fast.
Going Simple
And writing Go kinda opened a new passion in programming for me.
Coming from JavaScript and Rust really made me be costumed with complexity, and going now to Go really is making me value simplicity and having the less moving parts are possible.
I am becoming more aware from installing dependencies, checking to see their dependencies, to be sure that I'm not putting 100 projects under my own. And when I need something more complex but specific, just copy-and-paste it and put the proper license and notice of it, no need to install a whole project. All other necessities I just write my own version, since most of the time it can be simpler, a learning opportunity, and a better solution for your specific problem. With Go I just need go build to build my project, and when I need JavaScript, I just fucking write it and that's it, no TypeScript (JSDoc covers 99% of the use cases for TS), just write JS for the browser, check if what you're using is supported by modern browsers, and serve them as-is.
Doing this is really opening some opportunities to learn how to implement solutions, instead of just using libraries or cumbersome language features to implement it, since I mostly read from source-code of said libraries and implement the concept myself. Not only this, but this is really making me appreciate more standards and tooling, both from languages and from ecosystem (such as web standards), since I can just follow them and have things work easily with the outside world.
The evolution
And I kinda already feel like this is making me a better developer overhaul. I knew that with an interesting experiment I made.
One of my first actual projects was, of course, a to-do app. I wrote it in Vue using Nuxt, and it was great not-gonna-lie, Nuxt and Vue are awesome frameworks and still one of my favorites, but damn well it was overkill for a to-do app. Looking back... more than 30k lines of code for this app is just too much.
And that's what I thought around the start of this year, which is why I made an experiment, creating a to-do app in just one HTML file, using AlpineJS and PicoCSS.
The file ended up having just 350 files.
Today's artists & creative things
Music: Torna a casa - by Måneskin
There's something called the IndieWeb, or WesternWeb, or SmallWeb, whatever you wanna call it, which is the concept of going outside from social media and focus on personal websites.
The Problem with Social Media
I just think it is too much. I never really was a fan of posting on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and even things such as Mastodon and Pixelfed, and Tumblr I mostly like because it is the most "social-media-less" of the bunch. These platforms feel like you need to post something to other people, even if you don't care about it, there's a reason every one of these have some "like", "follow" and "trending" feature. And sometimes, I just want a space for myself and my hobbies y'know?
Using Tumblr has been great, but it still has that features and to be completely honest, its editor is kinda shit, and the conversion from Markdown to NPF (Neue Post Format, Tumblr's format) is not the greatest (Lately also, with some dramas I saw about moderation and the whole WordPress shenanigans, I don't really know the future).
However, I also know the usefulness of these platforms. Having an algorithm to recommend things is way convenient than trying to find things yourself, and can really make you know about a topic or art you would have never thought about looking into. And I would be hypocritical if I said that I didn't find people to talk with and make friendships. Also, platforms such as Mastodon and Pixelfed with their federation functionality, and BlueSky with its customizable feeds, are pushing into a more healthy and better social media experience personally.
Social media for me is the place if I want to consume in mass and show in mass what I do, since in its very nature, everything is about massive interactions and presence.
But never there was an actual place for me and my projects, until now.
The Web From Before
When I started having memories, around the year 12.010, the old internet was kinda dying. If you didn't know, before social media, people still interacted and posted things, in their own websites. There wasn't a central place you saw every single post or media, if you wanted to follow someone, you followed by seeing their websites on the regular, and interacted with them via e-mail, XMPP, Internet Relay Chat (IRC, which is what Twitch uses for its chats), and if the website was fancy, a direct inbox or comments section. Websites were found by just pure curiosity clicking on hyperlinks and jumping from site to site, or used a search engine (like Google, before it became shit) to find personal websites about a specific topic.
Even though I never actually lived this internet, I kinda want it back. Instead of a small solar system of big planets and center, I want a constellation of multiple solar systems and starts.
The Web From Before Today
And I can! These personal websites and ways of interacting with the internet still exist, just in smaller communities. Communities such as Neocities, the IndieWeb group (which is actually creating web-standards to improve this side of the internet), and even Tumblr can be somewhat considered, with its *.tumblr.com pages. There are still ways of creating your simple website and talking with people from others without the use of social media.
No likes, follows, recommendations if you don't want to. No big moderation team. No advertisement. No corporation controlling the content you put out there.
I want to try it, I want to learn about it more.
Since, being totally honest, I'm kinda hypocritical of all of this. Because even though I know about this side of the internet existing for a good while now, I haven't really put the effort into going there more often. Mostly because I think it stills too inconvenient.
The Web For the future
So I kinda want to try to improve it, not because I'm special or know better, but because I like to create tools for myself and know damn well that if this shit is inconvenient for someone tech-savy like me, it is even more for people who don't are.
I like this side of the internet, and want to make it more accessible and maybe find a good middle ground between social media and personal websites.
Because it can be fun to try something else.
Today's artists & creative things
Music: Passing Through (Can't the Future Just Wait) - by Kaden MacKay
Daily Blogs 356 - Oct 26th, 12.024
Being someone who actually codes and is a software engineer, please learn how to code.
Why?
Before anything else, it is fun, even more if you like puzzles and solve problems, and you could find your future career even.
Nonetheless, coding is an enormous skill to have nowadays with every little job, task, and even hobby, having some sort of technology or another. How many times have you wanted to rename a bunch of files into a more structured form? Or even wanted to have a fast way to see all your tasks for the day? Maybe you are animating in After Effects (unfortunately) and want to make an object pulse following a song beat? Or maybe in your job you have to make spreadsheets in Excel (again, unfortunately) and need something more dynamic? Or maybe, you want to have your own simple website? All of these things can be done, and can be easier, knowing a little bit of coding/scripting.
Coding not only lets you do things in a faster way, it also helps you better understand the technology you use. Did you never think how the little applications that you use are made? Because they are, by humans, like me and you, and that's why they have bugs most of the time. Maybe learning to code, you can even start modding your favorite game! Or even create your own.
But Coding is Hard!
I'm going to be honest, yes, it can be hard. But we aren't talking about doing whole software products or even what could be called engineering, we are talking about scripting/coding, which is just creating files for some utilities, which is far from hard. And instead of trying to explain, let me show you some examples.
Creating a Website
Yes, you heard me right, the first example is how to create a website, because you can do it in literally just a file:
"But it is ugly!", well, just modify a little the first file, and add another file!
And there it is! Your own website. Now to put it into the internet to everyone to see it is nothing more than uploading these two files to a Web Hosting Service, which most of the simple ones are free! A few examples are GitHub Pages, Vercel, Netlify, all of them you can find easy tutorials to upload your files and have them for the web!
What Are Those Files?
Glad you asked! Let's go step by step.
The first file, the one full of <tags\/>, is what is called an HTML file. HTML (or Hypertext Markup Language) is the language used by all websites you visit, it is designed to structure text in such a way that you can easily put meaning and style into the document, and have you browser read it to show you. These files are marked up using tags, which encapsulate text with an opening tag (like this one <p>) and a closing tag (like this one </p>, see the slash before the letter P), looking like this <p>Hello world</p>. We have multiple types of tags, such as <p> for Paragraphs, <h1> for Heading/titles, <h2> for subheadings/subtitles, <link> for linking one file to another, <ul> for an Unsorted List, which will have <li> for each List Item, <main> for informing what's the main content, <a> for an Anchor/hyperlink for another website, etc. etc. All HTML files will have an <html> encapsulating everything, a <head> tag for information about the page, and a <body> tag for the content of the page. That's pretty much how HTML works, and all you need is to learn what tag does what, and you're pretty much good to go.
In the second file, we just add some structure to it better, adding a <main> tag and a <div> tag with the ID "background", so the third file, the stylesheet, can make it look pretty! The third file, the one with the {} blocks, is a CSS (or Cascading Style Sheets) file, and it is the one that makes all of our websites beautiful. It is made by these "blocks" of code that applies styles for multiple elements in the page, it is a little bit more hard to explain, but in summary, that file does this:
The "#background" block applies styles to any tag with ID "background". In the example, we make the tag have 100% of the view width (width: 100vw) and 100% of the view height (height: 100vh); make the background be an Unsplash image; decrease the opacity, so the image is not so bright; apply a blur filter; and make its position be absolute in the top left corner, so it doesn't move with the rest of the content;
The "body" block applies styles to the tag and makes it display its content on a flexible layout (display: flex), which we use to make the content be centralized in the page;
We then make the text-color inside the tag white, use a sans font, and make it be in front (z-index: 2) of the tag (see the z-index: 1 in the "#background" block);
And to finish off, we make the color of links an aqua color.
That's pretty much it and pretty much how the fundamentals of how to create a website works. Just 2 files of code, and you can have your own website.
But Where Are the Loops? Where Are the "if"s?
Yes, yes, if you know the concept of coding, you may be asking where are all the loops, "if"s, and variables. Truth be told is that HTML and CSS aren't programming language per-say, they are markup languages to structure and display text, so they can't run anything really. However, they are easy to understand and are considered "code" nonetheless, and personally I find fascinating that websites, the thing we all access every single day, that most people I know think is magic… are based in two simple languages that anyone can learn in an afternoon and have its own website up and running in less than a day.
I Want real code!
Ok ok! Let's so add a little interactivity into our website. What about a little character you can control? Yes, a little game character to control with WASD on your website, with less than 40 lines of code. Let's first update the HTML file so we can add the character:
As you can see in the new file, we just added another <div> tag on the website, with the ID "player" and a <img> tag which we can use to add a visual sprite to our character! I'm using this simple sprite/gif I found on OpenGameArt.org. Also, in the new <div> we add some CSS styling directly in the tag, using the style attribute, the reason to this being that here we can manipulate its value with a programming language, in the case of the web, JavaScript. We add the JavaScript file with a <script> tag.
And in the JavaScript file, we can write this simple script:
This can be a little overwhelming, but let's go line by line:
First, we get the player element/tag with document.querySelector("#player") (similar on how in CSS we would use #player {} to style the tag). This tag is then saved into a variable player, think of it like a box or alias for document.querySelector("#player"), so when we use something like player.setAttribute it can be thought like document.querySelector("#player").setAttribute;
After that, we use player.setAttribute("data-coordinate", JSON.stringify({ x: 40, y: 20 })). This is just so we can more easily access the coordinates of the player after. An attribute is like that style in the tag, so calling this is like we wrote in the HTML file;
We again call player.setAttribute, but this time to rewrite the value of the style attribute, just to be sure. See how in the text for the style tag (the 2nd argument, aka the left: ${45}%; bottom:${20}%; ...), we use ${}? Well, this is a neat feature that lets us put values inside the text, so it makes the final result be left: 40%; bottom 20% ..., in this line it seems a little redundant, but in later in the lines we will use it more cleverly. Just remember that if we make a variable, a "box", like let x = 10 and use it inside the text like left: ${x}%, it would be in the end left: 10%;
Now the meat of the script, the "onKeyDown" function. A "function" in programming is like a piece of code you can reuse, and pass variables to it to use inside the code, like a box you can put stuff inside to it to do things, a box that uses other boxes, a box inception. Inside the "onKeyDown" function, we take back the value inside that data-coordinates attribute we wrote on the 3rd line, and put it inside the coordinates variable; than, we check if the key pressed is "d", if so, we add 1 to the X coordinate, we are changing the value of coordinate.x; we check for the other keys like "a", "w" and "s", changing the according variable to it; and then, we rewrite both the style attribute and data-coordinates attribute with the new value;
And finally, we use document.addEventListener("keydown", onKeyDown) to tell the browser "hey! Use this function ("onKeyDown") when a key is pressed!".
And that's pretty much it.
As you can see in the top right corner, the values of the style and data-coordinate attribute change when we press a key!
If you want to access this simple website, this is the live version of it hosted on GitHub Pages and the source-code is available under the public domain.
Learning More
Being honest, what I showed here is just a very small toy project, and a lot is simplified because of the gigantic convenience that the browser provides nowadays. But again, this is the type of thing you can do with just a little bit of knowledge on how to code, probably the scripts you will do can be even simpler than this. And just imagine the things you can invent, learning a little bit more!
Besides the toy project, code can be used in a lot of fields:
If you work on data or science in general, coding in Python is a great skill to have on your toolkit, and it is very easy to learn. It works great with creating graphs and can even be used inside Excel for creating more dynamic spreadsheets;
Do you want to make games? Well, learn something like Lua, a very simple language and one of my favorites for scripting, and powerful enough to be chosen by engines like Roblox Studio (which surprisingly is powerful than I thought). But if Roblox is not your taste, well, learn something like GDScript, the language of the Godot game engine, fully free, fully open;
Also, Lua is used for modding on games such as Factorio, and can be very powerful for small scripts for your computer;
If you want to make websites, HTML, CSS and JavaScript, learn them and go nuts (I won't recommend you use any framework as other programmers use, learn the fundamentals first). There are a lot of documentation about the web, and it is one of the fields with the lowest entry;
Are you an 3D Artist? Well then, Python is also the language used for creating add-ons, you can take some time to learn and create your owns to help your workflow!
And if you are a poor soul who is using Adobe products, first: my condolences; second, most Adobe products use ActionScript to create dynamic animations and values such as making an element react to music beats in After Effects.
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Learn to code, be happy, and maybe you will find a new passion like I did.
Today's artists & creative things
Music: Late Night Walk - by Ichika Nito
At the start of this week, Factorio: Space Age launched, aka the 2.0 update. Which is an update that I have been watching the development for some time now, reading the Friday Facts almost every week. And because I already showed my addiction love for this game on the 4° day, why not make another update on the factory after so many months?
Spaghetti
Yes, this is the state the factory was. Not that pretty.
I never actually played Factorio in survival mode, so I pretty much fucked up a lot. The main one was not preparing myself for Biters (the enemies) attacking my base on the start, which made me into a fight or flight response trying to research weapons and creating the box around the base.
This box really didn't help on trying to scale the base. Does it look cool? Yes, but as time passed, trying to make progress just ended up being more and more difficult. Space started to shirk, and finding places to put assemblies and pass belts became impossible, so going outside was necessary.
To do it, I needed to have a safe space to build. And because I, again, didn't know how to play the game properly, and had some quality-of-life mods, I used one of their features to build entire canals that separated me from Biters nests, so they wouldn't be able to attack or expand in the direction of the base.
And it worked! But consumed so many resources that I had to wait hours to gear up and complete everything.
Having to wait so much, seeing my resources running out inside the box and the difficulty to expand the base, let me think: "time to build an actual base, time to build a mega-base"; which again, in high sight, was a bad idea, since I didn't even have enough automation and even construction bots to scale to a "mega" state. But I tried, and again, started to fail. The main problem is that I didn't want to actually learn the crafting times, the resource amounts, the math needed to scale a base in Factorio, I just wanted something big, and something big fast.
The main idea was trying to use trains for everything, which kinda works, but makes everything need a lot more waiting and velocity. I wasn't able to make sections of the base produce things fast enough to other section to use and be always in motion, trains mostly waited until they're filled, and constructing everything at this scale was so fucking slow since I didn't have the resources for it, that it ended up just being a chore of waiting.
I stagnated.
Space
However, with the launch of Space Age, a new motivation arrived, which lined perfectly with a need to actually rest after my working days. Knowing that this update would come with a lot of new functionalities and that it would be a 2.0 release, a major version, and that old features (specially trains) would simply be incompatible with older versions, made me have a second chance to restart my survival world.
And that's what I did! I haven't played a lot, since finding time is somewhat difficult, but this week I tried harder to play at least one hour per day (somehow I didn't stay up all night, probably because my partner takes care of me better than I could myself). Progress is being slow, but I'm finally taking the time to actually learn the game, the math, and how to prevent things from exploding.
It's being fun to have fun again.
And I would end this post with some metaphor on things such as "I didn't want to learn things the proper way and take shortcuts", or "because of something unexpected, I started to panic", or "it is not good to jump into bigger things out of nowhere", or "sometimes is better to just restart"... but you're smart enough to figure those things out on your own.
Today's artists & creative things
Music: Fuck the Moon Fly Me to the Moon Cover - by Coward
Well, another thunderstorm, another day unable to work because of a black-out. Thankfully I was able to work from my laptop, but without things like a connection to a database, it is hard to do a lot.
Today's artists & creative things
Music: DECO*27 - ラビットホール feat. 初音ミク / GuitarCover🍁 - by かえで // kaede🍁
New tasks from the job, and new tasks from my own projects. Which both of them I couldn't complete today. JavaScript cache-busting with import maps generation is not as easy as I thought, hopefully I can try again in the future, but I don't want to spend a lot of time on one feature.
It is being interesting to create my own framework for my own projects.
Today's artists & creative things
Music: Bells - by The Unlikely Candidates
Well, almost less than 10 days until the end of these daily blogs, and to be totally honest, I don't really know what to do these last days.
Maybe I could write some posts from the backlog, which could take some hours, but after almost a year just making one paragraph posts, it could be a good idea. If I have enough time from my job, hopefully.
Today's artists & creative things
Music: Any Day Now - by Bo Burnham
Well, another day doing pretty much nothing. At least I was able to practice some guitar today. I'm still trying to organize my hobbies, since I don't want to lose my creative side, maybe I will try to watch more series and movies, since most of the videos that I watch aren't that creative and the one that are, take a lot of time to have new ones.
Today's artists & creative things
Music: Creator - by Lena Raine
kianamaiart
janainaart
tangentwithtanner
jbbartram-illu
dailybridgerton
blakekathryn
titsay
kaledo-art
