Yesterday’s waste of time

Yesterday was pretty much a waste of time. Trust me, reading this will not waste your time. It will save you time. Read it and remember it.

Of course, I’m speaking to you, Future Me. Who
the fuckelse would I be speaking to. Oh, you, random reader? Well, this might help you as well. You can read it, too.

And trust me, Present Me, writing this will not waste your time. For one thing, you will be passing knowledge on to Future You. Which is your
fuckingjob, after all, isn’t it. And besides, it’s too late. Haha! You are already Future You, learning from Past You!

The jokes on (past) you!

Here’s how you wasted yesterday and part of the day before. You were working on creating an ideal authoring environment for your Future Selves. You had built a proof of concept for voice typing in Glitch. Now you wanted to the real thing. So you spent hours, integer numbers of hours, not fractional hours, trying to integrate a bunch of stuff so that it would work really fast, and just the way you wanted it to. And after large amounts of yak shaving and wasted time you were working on Implementing a better chair in the sky?

The good news is: you found it. The bad news is how much
fuckingtime you spent looking for it.

The better way is CodeSandbox: Online Code Editor Tailored for Web Application Development. It’s lightning fast for reloading user interface code. Glitch is better for doing back-ends. And it’s better for serving a full stack solution. But guess what? They’re both integrated with Github, and once you’ve got a tuned front end working on a lightning-fast generic back-end, you can run it on your customized back end.

And in the meanwhile, all you need your special purpose back in for is authentication. Which you can do with the silly little lame bit of authentication code you already have running.

Yes, I know, it would be nice if you could do everything in one place. But right now you’ve got something fantastic that requires messing around in a couple of places. Kind of like where you are right now. You’re in a Google Doc. You are voice typing. Yes, you’re going to have to copy paste it into blogger and, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

But it works.

So, was yesterday really a waste of time? Yes, and no. The yes is that it took you an entire
fuckingday to learn something that I could have told you in one short paragraph. Here it is:

Hey Mike! Use CodeSandbox for front ends, glitch for back-ends.

Here’s something else:

Hey Mike! Figure out what problem you are trying to solve.

Of course, I’ve taken a lot longer than one paragraph to tell you. But that’s because I had to figure it out. Just like yesterday, it took the whole day to figure out what I know now.

This is knowledge creation at work. This is your ~fucking~ job.

Do your job!

PS: I just took my own advice. See this post to see how.

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More retrospective

I've continued reading old posts. It's a slow process because I'm not just reading them, I'm fixing them. I'm using a package called Grammarly that plugs into my browser and does both spelling and grammar checking. It's finding lots of mistakes.

Yesterday I nearly lost a 2300 word post. When I tried to recover it I found that archive.org didn't have a copy. And neither did Google's cache. But it was only one of the few blog entries that I'd cross-posted to another blog. Whew. That was lucky. I would have been sad to miss that one. So right away I backed up my blog. And I need to do something to back it up more regularly.

I want a better research and composition tool than the standard blogger editor. What I'd really like to do is to do all my work in a cloud-based environment and have it track where I go (which Google web history already does) and what I do when I get there.

For example, I'd like a way to screenshot a region and have it automatically saved to where I can easily reference it. Something like this:

I have an open, running "Shit I did today" post. As I navigate the web article titles (with embedded URL) are inserted in my SIDT post. If I take a picture of part of a screen, it gets added (with a link). If I highlight and copy some text, it automatically pastes it (with attribution) in the SIDT post.

I can pop up a mini-editor, in place (I don't have to switch windows to my SIDT post) in order to get it. And whatever I type in that editor goes to my SIDT post, as well.

To get what I want I need (among other things) a Chrome extension. So I'm going to have to learn to do that.