Quality Matters

 This is hard from a sprinter. The more I know, the more I want to pause a little bit. Have I lost my edge?

I started my most recent project as a middle tier developer, doing API work. I got handed a turd, put enough polish on it to get to production. It was a .net MVC app that was pretty poorly architected, so it was decided that we'd build a Vue app that did the same thing, but with a different front end. Long story short, I'm a front end developer now. I need to cobble together some js libraries into a somewhat cohesive whole. And js libraries are complicated. I want to do something simple like masking an input, and it is hard. The language lends itself to developing deep chains of functional madness. Fucking arrays and loops are my life. Map this, filter that. Jesus Fucking Christ. It is so easy to just add.

I've always been running so fast that I've only wanted to know as much as I needed to. What was required to get something done. What is the whim of the master? We witches will make it happen. People don't care about what happens behind the curtains, they only want to interact with the stage. It's a lot better at this point, but browser compatibility makes it hard to do fun things. I have a bad feeling that Chrome is going to be the new IE 6. If FaceMeta makes a browser, we're fucked. Your standards are belong to us.

The pandemic really slowed things down. While 50% of the world melted into booze and depression, I had the time to think about the best way of doing things, time to refactor and organize. To make something that should last beyond the frameworks. It's fun again.

Is Algebra Worth It?

 My youngest is taking algebra. They are learning factoring right now. x squared + 2x + 3 stuff. It's really mind boggling. The mechanics are straight forward, but it is like following steps for how to pray to the machine. We of the unclean hand must keep the sacred plug in the socket. The generator must roar! We gently press the button of majesty, await the blazing phosphor of the night cave, it is your blessing! The light of healing. The board of keys must enter the A - D - M - I - N of glory to be able to ask the questions of the faithful.

You are learning the mechanics of breaking down an equation  to build it up again, and exercise in the mechanics of problem solving. Describing physical space mathematically is useful, and the ability to look at something complex and break it down into more simple parts is important. I do that on a daily basis. I mean fuck, you should look at a replacer function for replacing values in a string. Input masks are fucking irritating. I still haven't spent the time to get the cursor back in the right place. That's really irritating to the user. Although there are worse things. I have a friend who's writing a CBOR reader/writer to move things with the least footprint possible. Half the time it makes no sense what he's talking about, but it's cool stuff. I got excited about designing an input box. I'm shitty with the looks, but I'm finally learning how to bake in functionality with vanilla ts. I really admire the fucking effort people put in to make good looking controls that do interesting things. I don't want to reinvent the wheel, but so many brilliant libraries are fucking huge, they are built for the wild west, the land of browser wars, having to rewrite everything to target to the specific browser. 

Thank you for the standards that have made it so that I can read MDN documentation and have what I want to do work in multiple places like yelling in a universal language. I'm still doing cave paintings, but I'm going back to my algebra, my mechanics, to learn from the ground up before I pick up the tools again. This way I'll know a lot more about how to evaluate frameworks, and learn ways to get things done when the framework comes up short.

Gardens are the new art

 It's not actually new, but it has been inaccessible to most individuals. With the constraints of space and time and materials, it is something that only the elite have been able to partake in. I talked to my neighbor, and I don't know if they were being honest, but their brother-in-law works for a family in Texas that has a 15 acre (or something) garden that they uproot and re-design on the family's whim. That is insane to me, but I have a hard time pulling weeds because I want to keep the soil covered and as undisturbed as possible.

We always want fast, because time is expensive. That's the fucked up thing about minimum wage. It should be wage you can afford. I agree with minimum wage as a bare minimum, but then wage should be tied to the profit of the company. Everyone's worth is the same, and my time to do something I don't want to do is high. Unfortunately, that doesn't translate for things that I want to do. I'll help a friend all weekend putting up a fence or pulling blackberry for a couple of beers. I don't want to do the cost analysis on our chickens or turkeys, but I'd rather give one away to someone who I know, or who needs one than try and recoup my 'investment'. It's probably privilege speaking. I earn enough at my job that I can afford a hobby farm. We aren't the best farmers, but treat our animals well, feed them healthy feed and give them space. Then we kill them, clean them, and put them in the freezer for the year.

We have a roughly 1 acre wooded corner that I would like to turn into a young version of a native forest. I want to build fungus and moss gardens that thrive. We are all capable of art, and at its core art takes a seed in the creative sense, and the ability of the artist to show their craft. Can it be beautiful without the gardener?

 I started a post yesterday, but I was too stoned to actually write anything. I blame TV. I think my oldest was watching NARCOS Mexico and I got sucked in. I wish there were more moments of peace and serenity, where I could type stuff into the computer that looked like what GPT-2 would have produced with the prompt: Write something like a stoned person would about forests, farming, sustainability, or javascript.

Initial Ramblings - Something to start with

I was thinking about how I need to figure out how to extract more from our place. I am learning more and more about what to put in, but not nearly enough on getting something back for it. Luckily, this form of waste should be putting assets in the bank, I am doing it more wastefully than I could, and alternately more slowly because I don’t have a bunch of capital to invest.

The idea of audience is an interesting one. I was taking a walk the other day and thinking of art and a method of information transfer. Some way to translating what the artist experiences to another person.

The power is in reducing the unnecessary

an impression of an event as an emotionally processed experience

does the translation hold?

I suppose this blog is the journey of finding an audience, hopefully making good things.