The eternal quest
The world is a big, mostly-beautiful place. It's full of a lot of stuff that I like to learn about, and when I learn about something, I like sharing it with others, or at the very least, remembering that I learned about it in the first place. That leads me to my ultimate question:
How do I get this all down?
In my mind, I want there to be a catch-all app, site, or methodology to capture everything worthwhile that I've been learning, or at least spending my time on. This magical catch-all solution would include the following:
- A general notebook to write down concepts I need help fortifying, or returning to later (think "notepad full of collegiate lecture scribblings"). Almost strictly related to technical concepts.
- A natural progression from the above point - refining my ideas and sharing them out with others to help educate and fortify my own learning via synthesis. More akin to what folks might consider a devlog, or at least a write-up of my own technical progress.
- A way to write about the things I'm enjoying, in equal parts to share out my current geekings-out with others, and to reflect on why I'm enjoying them in the first place.
- A way to hold myself accountable on the progress I'm making as a developer and a musician. Points 1-3 above cover the developer side of it, but I've not even touched on the internalized urge to set aside practice time as a musician. Another point for another post. At any rate, some sort of practice log or video journal would be great for this, but even just a running list of my efforts is better than nothing.
- A journal for personal reflection. More of an external urging on this one for the time being, as this is a muscle I can never seem to grow, but so many folks1 consider it the crux of a well-balanced perspective on life that I'd really like to improve upon it.
The obvious solution to the above is to just use five different services to handle these five ostensibly different "life logs." A GitHub repository2 for point one above. An AdSense-fueled, WordPress-adjacent blog (or LinkedIn content drip) for point two. A personal blog for point three. A private YouTube or Vimeo channel for point four. And a good old fashioned IRL notebook for point five. The only problem here is that there is not a chance in hell that I'm keeping up with five bespoke "life-capturing" mediums. I'm already spending too long writing this single post; the thought of updating four more after this sounds miserable.
On the flip side, try as I might, I have not been able to find a single solution that allows me to do all of the above in one fell swoop. My aforementioned GitHub repository approach doesn't work half bad as a combined technical notebook and journal, though in practice, the journal falls by the wayside since sitting at my PC two hours after work does not put me in the reflective writing mood. But in the same breath, my handwriting is terrible, and has only gotten slower and worse over time, while my keyboard typing is still as fast as ever. Factor those points out, and I'm still trying to post game reviews on Backloggd, book reviews on Goodreads, et cetera ad nauseum.
This brings me to my current approach and possible solution - combine what I can, where I can. Understand that there is no perfect solution. If the output helps me, it is worth the time. If it does not, get rid of it and regroup.
So here we have a blog which neatly covers points two and three, and allows me to dig into point five as much or as little as I'd like. Point one still falls to my almighty Notebook repository, though the more coding I do in practice vs. in theory has rendered it slightly less important. Additionally, as a PC user with an iPhone and a MacBook, I think I may try to implement a MS OneNote notebook as a means to quickly share notes across all of my devices with minimal headache, but I'll share out about that more in the future. It would also allow instantaneous generation of thoughts for a journal since my phone is always within reach - no moments of "Ugh, I left my notebook at home," or "I've been locked in my office all day, I'm not gonna sit in here for another 30 minutes just to get a few journal thoughts down."
This still leaves the question of how I'm going to handle point four neatly, but I can always post about my musical progress here as a stop-gap. Plus, like I said already, that's a different story for a different post.
Great. Now I know how I'm going to do this thing. All that's left is to do it.
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1I'm burying the lede on point five because I really didn't want to use the "S" word, so let me back into it with a disclaimer: the "rise-and-grind, breadwinner provides for the family and nothing else, never show weakness, be an alpha male" mindset is total hogwash, and I hate that there is an entire philosophy that has been tarnished in the current zeitgeist due to its co-opting of the phrase. All of that said, I believe that the true tenets of the aforementioned "S" word, Stoicism, are extremely valuable, and I feel that I owe a lot of my current growth in life to the philosophy. And, to tie this back to the list, the best and least-toxic (as far as I can tell) proponents of Stoicism are fierce advocates for keeping a journal.
2As an aside to any aspiring developers, initializing a repository and having it live on GitHub works surprisingly well as a catch-all study notebook - you can instantiate different projects and packages down multiple branches for different languages, organize the file tree however you see fit, mix plenty of properly-formatted code in with .txt or .md files as you see fit, edit in an IDE of your choosing, and keep the whole thing neat and tidy in GitHub itself.