Annual Review 2018
We're coming to the end of the year, a time when I can’t help but look back at how the year went and reflect on my wins, losses, and lessons learned.
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The Next Chapter 🎏
Yesterday marked the end of my time working on [Manuscript], as the transition of the product over to its new owner is complete. With that, I'd been looking for a new contract, and today I'm happy to announce that I'll be joining the team at [Glitch]!
Stylin' Sidebar.js in Glitch
My main social network these days is Micro.blog, where I post short updates, thoughts, and images, then syndicate those posts out to the big social media silos. I have a hosted blog on the Micro.blog service for this, but because I want this site to be the canonical source for all things Angelo, I wanted to pull in that content here.
Thoughts On Indigo, Two Weeks Later
While v1.0 of my first Hugo theme, Indigo, was [released two weeks ago][indigo-released], it was only added to the [Hugo themes gallery][indigo-gallery-link] (and [tweeted about][indigo-tweet] from the Hugo account) five days ago. Since then, I've learned a couple of things that I thought I'd share.
Introducing Indigo
Indigo is a lightweight theme for [Hugo][hugo] with [IndieWeb][indieweb] features baked in. It's great for longer-form blogging, placing its focus on distraction-free reading and beautiful typefaces.
Zeus
We lost our little buddy one year ago today.
He was the sweetest animal I've ever known. The thing I remember most about him: you barely had to say two words to him, and he'd start purring loudly, probably followed by him flopping onto his back for fluffy belly rubs.
Feedback Loops
A feedback loop is system where the output is fed back into the system as an input. They exist everywhere in nature, and they typically come in two flavours: positive feedback loops, which move things away from a state of equilibrium, and negative feedback loops, which work to preserve balance.
On risk
Standing still is generally a safe bet. We don't have to expend any energy, and we don't have to concern ourselves much with the possible outcomes. We just stand there, and watch the world go by.
Making progress is a little different. Making progress is risky.
Every Day Carry
Since mid-February, a notebook has become a big part of my productivity system. There's something about putting pen to paper that's inherently more satisfying to me than poking at keys to make characters appear on a screen. Over six months later, I'm still writing in it daily.
I don't carry my notebook with me everywhere, though. I carry very little with me, in fact: my phone, wallet, and my keys (and really, only the keys that I need). There's something about the encumbrance of carrying a lot of stuff that irritates me.
On Friday, however, I picked up a Rhodia A7 notebook for a couple of bucks. It's quite small and, paired with a Fisher Bullet space pen, adds very little bulk to my pockets. The first thing I did was completely deface the first page with random lines and scrawl a note to myself on a moving train:
There — now you can use this notebook.
Enjoy.
I've carried it with me for only one full day and I've already filled a couple of pages with some notes based on a phrase I heard.
Now, I could have just as easily captured that phrase in my phone. I'm not sure that the rest of my thoughts on the idea, however, would have flowed as easily. I find that there's something inherently more frictionless with putting ideas into a scrappy little book; it's a very free-form medium, devoid of any requirements for line spacing or margins.
I don't know if transcribing notes to my main notebook will get annoying. Or if that's even necessary, really. And despite the small size, it is one more physical thing (well, two, if you count the pen) that I have to carry around, and I do notice it.
I'm not sure if this new habit will take, but so far it's off to a good start.
Glitch Project Name Lottery
Glitch creates randomized project names when you remix a project, and they look something like adjective-noun.glitch.me. You can always rename these later, but oftentimes they’re just too amusing to bother (I’m looking at you, victorious-beer).
So, what if you decided that you were going to remix the node starter app, and then had to spend a couple of hours building an app based purely on the random name you were assigned?
Well, you’d end up with something like Therapeutic Caribou.
I’d been poking at TextBlob in Python over the weekend. Why not find an npm module that handles sentiment analysis to create a little app that takes in what you’re saying and replies based on how positive or negative the sentiment is. I’m using the wink-sentiment module to do this in analyzer.js, but it should be fairly easy to swap out any other analysis module in the rankSentiment() function.
And while we’re at it, why not make it so that you’re just talking to the web app, rather than typing? I’ve been working through Wes Bos’ JavaScript30 course and, as luck would have it, just went through the native SpeechRecognizer project.
Given that this is something that I threw together in a couple of hours, it’s very far from complete — our therapeutic caribou is a pretty lousy conversationalist, there are a couple of bugs around SpeechRecognizer events, and the design is… well, pretty unpleasant. Additionally, I’ve only tested this in Chrome, so I have no idea if it works as expected in other browsers.
With all that said, it was still a lot of fun to throw something together that let me play with a bit of both client- and server-side JavaScript, some neat native technologies like SpeechRecognizer, and some interesting concepts like sentiment analysis.
If you try playing the Glitch Project Name Lottery, let me know what you come up with!