My site about productivity and programming
(To skip my narration and jump to the setup part, click here .) As you might have noticed, fd93.me has comments now! Specifically, comments powered by isso . In this article, I want to talk about the various decisions and technical steps that led me to the current setup. While this …
In Note #4 I mentioned that I was adopting the Johnny Decimal system for organizing my notes. So far this has gone well, and if it continues to be successful I will extend this system to cover other resources besides notes, as the manual suggests . I'm sharing this index in …
Chinese New Year ended a week ago. 新年快樂！There are many traditions associated with the New Year, some of which are widely known: fireworks, gifting of hongbao , and playing loud music to scare away Nian . One less known New Year tradition is spring cleaning , which removes bad …
Last weekend, my partner and I visited a second-hand bookstore and I bought two books: How to Write Short by Roy Peter Clark, and The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs. I passed over higher-minded alternatives like Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century ; I prefer …
Due to my accelerated AWS study schedule I haven't had much time to work on projects this week, other than some self-hosting maintenance. Instead, I spent some time eyeballing the game launches coming out this month: Hollow Knight: Silksong Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles Hades 2 All are great …
This week I've spent most of my free time studying for the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam using the excellent courses from Adrian Cantrill . However, my timeline for taking the exam is pretty tight (my choice), so I've had to switch up my study approach. Initially I was listening to …
I bought the domain fd93.me in 2021, not long after I moved to Asia. Originally it was a Wordpress site hosted on AWS Lightsail, but I got tired of the complexity of Wordpress for actually writing. See The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Simple Websites , which was itself inspired by No …
Sometimes I feel overwhelmed trying to manage everything I have to do. Lists work okay if they're short, but grow out of control and fuel new anxieties: am I failing to stay on top of things? Writing a daily agenda lets me get a ton of things done, but burns …
I've had an interest in Zen Buddhism since my college years. Initially this was a rather silly and superficial thing: samurai were cool, and they practiced Zen. I think the first Zen-inspired book I read was The Unfettered Mind: Writings from the Zen Master to the Swordsman . Over the years …
Like many people in the 2020s, I travel a lot. I work in a different city to the one I live in, and spend a few days in one place and a few days in the other. I don't really mind travelling, but it comes with a few inconveniences. One …
I recently bought a few spiral-bound notebooks from Muji - two for work, and two for personal use. My intention for the personal notebooks was to use them as a destination for inconsequential thoughts, schemes, grocery lists, todo lists, and so on. In digital note-taking software these are often called 'fleeting …
When writing a web service in Rust you may be tempted to do careful research based on your use case, to tailor your code to fit the needs of a typed language with strict memory safety, and to take a pragmatic approach to development. Doing things this way might make …
If you've hung out in Linux enthusiast circles lately, you'll have heard whispers that Arch Linux is no longer hot product. Instead, all the cool kids are using something called NixOS. Since I bricked my Debian setup in an unfortunate accident involving compiling from source, I decided to give NixOS …
If you just want the VirtualBox VM for this article without the philosophising, skip to the appendix. We live in a world full of distractions. In the modern "attention economy" it's more of a challenge to avoid content and advertising than it is to find it. Nowhere is this more …
Wouldn't it be great if you could type out an article on your computer, push a couple of buttons, and have it appear on the web? No clunky page builders, no admin logins, and no mandatory updates. With the right setup for your website, this is possible. I wrote about …
Simple websites are better than beautiful ones. I'll repeat that for the folks in the back. Simple websites are better than beautiful ones. Let me be clear what I mean by a simple website. I don't mean a Wordpress site with a minimalist theme. I also don't mean a Substack …
In a previous article I discussed the power of todo lists and their use in organising your tasks. I have a confession: for a long time I didn't use task lists. This is because of some practical issues which plagued me as a user of those tools. And when I …
After writing the lexer I could turn any math expression into a set of tokens. However, they were still organised as a list and couldn't be used to do any useful work. To go from a list of tokens to a program, I needed to write a parser . The goal …
Trying to build a complex program in Python is like trying to build a house out of jello. I love it, but while Python's delicious, flexible, and lacks the annoying quirks of most languages, this relaxed nature is a dire problem for complex projects. Python uses duck typing : If it …
Many of my students ask questions like: How long does it take to get your first job? How do I know I'm ready to apply for jobs? What do I need to know to get my first programming job? They are often frustrated when I say "it depends". But this …
If you want the short answer: probably not. If you want the long answer, read on. I recently had an interesting conversation with one of my clients. They were very concerned about the impact that advanced AI like GPT-4 would have on the market for programming jobs. In other words …
If you search the internet, you'll find a ton of information about portable Linux distros such as Slax. But most articles just give a list of what's out there and popular without taking the time to explain how to set them up - and believe me, the set up process for …
I was overwhelmed. I’d made a kanban board with fifty cards, each beautifully color-coded and allocated story points. I’d organised my calendar beautifully, mapping out the free time to write code every day that week. I’d constructed a burn-down chart and factored in my doctors’ appointment, sleep …
This is part of a series of short articles on rational tools to help you be more productive while still practicing self-care. To jump to the summary, click here . Do you procrastinate? How much? Do you feel like you could achieve more if you procrastinated less? Wouldn’t it be …
Learning Chinese from textbooks and school courses can be a weird experience when you try to apply it in the real world. Sure, you just learned the grammar to say "My friend cooks poorly" wǒ de péngyǒu zuò fàn zuò bù hǎo; 我的朋友做饭做不 …
Zhuyin (or Bopomofo) is the main phonetic writing system in Taiwan. But a lot of language schools in both Taiwan and the West don't teach it. This is because Zhuyin is harder to learn for English speakers, and only used in Taiwan. Rather than being a reading and writing system …
Or: 8 Tips To Not Burn Out If you're not familiar with it, Anki is a flashcard app which can help you memorise any kind of information. It's a great tool for situations where you need to focus on remembering details, facts, or pieces of information. A lot of language …