100 Days, Day 7: Week 1 Reflections

I am beginning to realize that a significant portion of what I want to do with this hundred days project is to become a more organized person, publicly, online. This may not be the best way to go about it.

The reality of the situation is that I'm trying to blend infrastructural improvements with a daily creative practice, and I can't really do both at the same time. I'm building the boat while I'm sailing it.

That recognition has made things feel a bit overwhelming. On days where I don't have several hours to work on things, I've defaulted to implementing quick, ugly solutions (e.g. using Ghost's built-in header injection to do a three sketch) so I can make something quickly. Since one of my broader goals with this project is to stop defaulting to quick and ugly solutions, that's not great. At this stage, it's better for my long-term goals if I spend half an hour working on infrastructure than if I duct-tape a few primitives into the Ghost content manager.

Finally, it's a lot more embarrassing to tweet out a half-finished implementation of open-source software than it is a cool code sketch with shaders. To that end, I think I'm going to stop sharing my work on social media every day so I don't feel the pressure to make something consumable.

On the positive side, taking on an overwhelming/unfamiliar project has its pluses. I've already gotten more familiar with Nginx, broken out some atrophied command line muscles, and tried out two new pieces of software, Ghost and TiddlyWiki. Thanks to this, I feel much more equipped to rapid prototype on the server instead of localhost than I did a week ago.

The goal for the coming week is to manage my own scoping and expectations. I want to have a list of clearly scoped options to choose from, even if the list itself feels overwhelming.

Accomplished

• Set up Ghost site
• 4 blog posts
• 2 dumb threejs injections
• Tried setting up AppFlowy, realized it was desktop-only, experienced extreme regret
• Set up TiddlyWiki
• Wrote TiddlyWiki setup tutorial

Near-Term Project Grab Bag

Infrastructure

• Get to fully self-hosted
• Fix TiddlyWiki saving, looks like an issue with URL prefixing
• Work on website _aesthetic
• Add blog comments
• Self-tracking
• Solution for code sketches (embedded editor? another separate server?)

Creative

• Video chat > Three.js (what if this, but video chat?)
• Mini-apps like hundred days tracker
• Code sketches: sacred geometry, 10-dimensionalism, building the boat while I'm sailing it

Knowledge Management

• Password protect TiddlyWiki lol
• Get more familiar with TiddlyWiki
• Tagging system
• Start using TiddlyWiki instead of OneNote for daily note-taking
• Start by migrating one thing - are.na is a good candidate