2 (or more?) weeks since I shut down my social media accounts and I have to say my life is so much better.
I no longer wake up to the feeling that the entire world is on fire and that my only duty in life is to save it by dousing it with water.
Mornings are calmer. I get up, make some coffee, sip and enjoy the taste, meditate on my plans, read a book , take a bath and get online for work on time.
My ability to focus on my work is so much better, now that I am not doom-scrolling Twitter/FB on the side, while my code is compiling.
Never in my professional life have I been able to focus so long and so intensely on stuff. I was always scared of letting my social media presence go, but once I did, life just went on, even improving in some ways.
Of late I have been having plenty of thoughts about improving the state of things in general. You know, as the Silicon Valley cliche goes, make the world a better place.
I started to realize that in order to cleanup the world, one must first cleanup the mind: via one’s thoughts and actions. I realized that I no longer have to change the world all at once, but leave a tiny mark, that might perhaps serve as a waypoint for someone else treading along the same path.
To wit, I unjacked myself from all digital consumption. Social media and an explosion of information has turned as all into mute, passive consumers or much worse: into zombies programmed to react on events triggered by certain algorithms. Information that is worth reaching you, a human, must definitely take its time to be crafted and if someone really wants to refute what you say, you must make it as hard as possible for them to reach, such as writing an email or mailing you a hate letter, the old-fashioned way. Quote Retweets and replies have made is all too easy for passive scrollers to shit on your work all too quickly.
No more Twitter, no more Facebook , no more scrolling news websites for dopamine (sorry ZeroHedge, but you are first on the list). I cancelled my Netflix subscription as well (not that I really watched anything on it, but I will grant myself a temporary reprieve to watch Season 3 in Jan). The Netflix budget has been repurposed to support my website.
Yes, I finally hit a decent solution to host a website of my own ! You can find it on https://gowind.in.
It looks a little wonky, but I think I found a nice compromise between hosting raw markdown files and bikeshedding over Node vs Golang based static site generators.
I use Vimwiki to write my markdown, Mkdocs to preview it as HTML and package it as a directory that can be hosted and do the actual hosting with NGINX.
Its really not more than an hour or so’s work to setup your own HTTPS site ! I swear, software has gotten amazingly smooth ! 10 mins to buy your domain from “gandi.net”, 10 mins to sping up a VM on Digital Ocean, a little bit more time to setup your nameservers, a few more to generate a SSL certificate using Lets Encrypt’s certbot and boom, you are in business.
Now that I have my site, I am thinking of what to host. Rather than writing blog posts for the sake of blog posts, I am going to write my posts based on what I do, not what I think I want to do.
I have been working with Javascript and Typescript projects. It is my first proper new platform in 4+ years since I started writing Clojure professionally. As Crockford says, Javascript is a really misunderstood languages with a few good parts and a lot of terrible parts. Typescript is a real fresh breath of air and has so far made my foray into the `NPM download dogshit` world a nice experience. I am currently reading through Kelshev's
book on writing a PEG parser from scratch and it so far has been a wonderful learning experience. I am at the chapter where he teaches ARM assembly and looking forward to writing my own Parsers (humble brag: I did write a parser for a very simple JSON like object, will upload the code later and link it in my site).
The pursuit of deep knowledge, while tedious and stressful, is deeply rewarding.
I have been thinking and coding on a few thoughts and ideas. As they turn more concrete, I will jot them down and publish them down them line.
My mind has turned deeper towards philosophy and I am currently reading the book “Tripura Rahasya” by Swami Ramananand Saraswathi. Recommended by a friend, it seems to be one of the most concise book summarizing the breath of Hindu philosophy while promoting a path to Moksha in the way of Advaita philosophy. I gotta say, its not an easy read and I suspect this is one of the books that I will have to read atleast 10 times to really get the depth of the meaning. But one has to start somewhere.
Anyway, that is all it for my November’s update. Till the next time !