Motivations

You may have noticed a lot of issues in this simple repo. Why so many issues?

Well first off, I’m probably a perfectionist. And I have ADHD. And I was raised Southern Baptist in the Deep South. And I got kicked out of my elementary school science fair for making a fake laser – which wasn’t fair because I clearly explained on the cardboard placard that it was a Light Amplification SIMulated Emission Radiation (L.A.S.E.R.) – Em.pha.sis. on “Sim”-umlated. I was a kid, I didn’t know how to “stim”ulate anything.

Fortunately, those aren’t the issues we’re talking about. But it may overlap a bit because I’m using GitHub Issues as my CMS.

Blame Shawn Wang. He made the framework this site is based on. I really think he’s on to something with this GitHub Issues as CMS. It checks all the important boxes. I’ve had at least a dozen versions of this site. PHP, Flash, Wordpress (PHP), Ruby, Jekyll, Hugo, Node, Squarespace, Racket…

I didn’t want to pay for something I barely used. I didn’t want something that broke because I barely used it. I didn’t want something that I didn’t remember how to use it because I barely used it. I didn’t want to git push origin master for every single update. Perhaps most importantly, I wanted something that I easily access from any of my devices. And finally I wanted platform that would be flexible enough for fun experiments.

GitHub + Svelte hit the sweet spot. Over the holidays, I familiarized myself with SwyxKit and found myself really admiring Shawn Wang’s principles to work and learn in public.

Remember that bit about being a perfectionist? (I’ve already rewritten the first couple of paragraphs multiple times.) I love writing but hate blogging because blogging doesn’t address a specific problem. So I never publish what I write. Or that’s my excuse.

When I started kicking the tires on this kit, the oddest thing happened: the obnoxious gray grid on my GitHub profile started to show signs of life.

I’m usually not a fan of performance metrics and had long given up on an impressive profile because most of my work was locked behind enterprise firewalls, but this, this felt nice.

So I resolved to show some signs of life on GitHub nearly everyday. Nothing automated but nothing elaborate either. I can fake it, but I still have to show up to the science fair.

I have to laugh at myself for minute. I search for a perfect paradigm for years and the minute I find, I change the rules on a whim.

Anyway, the main motivation is personal. Just building out a muscle memory. Maybe I’ll get better at writing along the way. And maybe I’ll even start talking about the things I really care about.

For instance, there’s this line in Paul Klee’s Pedagogical Sketches that been sticking in my craw for the last few days: “When a line stops moving, it ceases to be a line. It becomes a plane.” He didn’t stated exactly like that so maybe I’m riffing on my interpretation. But it’s a wild claim.

Think about it in the context of knowledge graphs that rely on lines to convey every relation. Now think about a whiteboard and the motion of scrolling a line from idea to another. The second example is an action. It becomes a line. But when it’s done, it is no longer a line. It is topology. It’s a notch in a plane.

I think Paul Klee is right about this one. If he’s right, we may be designing the wrong things.

Alright, it’s nearly midnight and I need to hit Submit.