Reflecting on the past quarter

It has been a while.

The Procrastination

I actually had a draft of a blog post for quite some time, and it had something to do with cloud provisioning and automated deployments. I was going to publish it a week after the first post, however one week became two, two weeks became a month, and now it has been three months since I created the blog.

I kept telling myself that I should just get the post over and done with, so that I could continue working on other coding projects that I was interested in, yet I just couldn't bring myself to continue writing. It became this weird habit where whenever I opened the file, I would switch over to YouTube and watch videos until the day ended.

Inspiration and Exploration

Fortunately, I have had bouts of inspiration from time to time over the past three months. As I have mentioned before, I do love me some tinkering, and I have been doing exactly that with NixOS. If you haven't heard, NixOS is a Linux distribution that uses the Nix package manager. The special feature of NixOS is that the entire system is built declaratively, and everything is configured by editing files. This allows the system to be pretty reliable and reproducible, which are perks I do value. Some of the downsides are that using the Nix language is tough and there aren't many good documentation out there, but I'll take it as an opportunity to learn. While I haven't even scratched the surface of NixOS (I was too busy ricing my desktop), I do plan to dive deeper into the Nix language and experiment with NixOS using different machines as well.

The thing is, a month ago I only had a single machine, my desktop. The fact that NixOS could be easily reproduced on a another machine gave me a little urge to get one. Combined with the fact that I was going to physical events more frequently, I started looking into getting a laptop. However, I didn't want to just get any laptop, since I knew I wasn't going to use it too often, I have my desktop for everything I need. Besides, a brand new laptop could cost quite a bit, and I wanted to be as economical as possible. While browsing through some options, I also decided that it would be interesting to get a touchscreen device instead, so that I have a unique hardware feature I could tinker with. I ended up getting a refurbished Surface Go, which is a 2-in-1 detachable tablet, but did I really want to work on a device with such a small detachable keyboard?

The answer was no, I did not want to work on a small detachable keyboard, so I got something even smaller. Let me explain. I didn't want to get the detachable keyboard because I did not want to squish my hands so close each other. I have also gotten used to my mechanical keyboard now and I couldn't bear the thought of having to use a normal keyboard. I could bring my current keyboard out, but it would feel pretty clunky and I started dreaming of something more low profile. I did a little digging and spiraled down a deep rabbit hole, as it seems that this journey isn't deep enough already, and I came across the crkbd, a.k.a. the Corne keyboard. It is a split keyboard with column staggered keys, unlike the usual row staggered ones, and I ended up impulsively purchasing the v3 which only has 42 keys. Once I got it, I ended up spending all my time practicing typing, as well going further down the rabbit hole by experimenting with a new keyboard layout.

Reflection

Once I realized I wasn't going to finish the draft that I had set out to write, I took some time to reflect. This isn't my first rodeo with procrastination, but this is one of the times where the panic monster does not wake up. I soon came to the conclusion that I wasn't happy with the post that I was drafting up. It felt like I was just lazily and unoriginally rewriting the documentation of the tools I used, so I scrapped it.

So there I was, stuck in some sort of limbo where I have done so much, yet at the same time I felt like I had not done anything at all. Even when I tried setting rules and schedules to do certain things, if I don't feel like doing it, I can't. Yet when I let myself loose a little, I can end up spending hours spiraling out of control, and maybe into a little madness. That's one of the key takeaways that I have found over this duration, which is to let myself free to explore and create when I can, and to not bog myself down with lists of tasks just for the sake of having it. I should also reflect more often on what I am doing, as well as the "why" of what I am doing, if that makes sense, so that I can decide if I should stick or switch.

Finally, while writing this post, I noticed I have been a little obsessed with changing everything I have and everything I do. It's a little suspicious and I probably should reflect on that, or well, maybe tomorrow.