Word Count: 321

This will probably be short, but I wanted to talk a little bit about making things, and the barriers I seem to have to making things. I used to (and sometimes still) find it pointless to try making something when it already exists, especially in a nontrivial capacity, and there’s no utility involved. On the flipside, there is the notion of writing something or making something to learn, which only sometimes supercedes my desire to only work on impactful things.

I recently read Dave Gauer’s post on his project stack, a way to keep track of tasks in a LIFO manner, especially as it mirrors real life nested learning. In that post, he cites Peter Fidelman’s distrackted as a fun software/script equivalent, and also mentions the idea of Start Often Finish rArely. At the time, this was a scary concept to me in my delusions of perfectionism, making the perfect thing or something actually useful, but I am slowly becoming more comfortable with the idea of trying new things for the sake of it, and being fine with it falling to the wayside, whether I learn or reinforce or some secret third thing.

Ironically, reading distrackted’s code also gave me my own idea - what if I could replicate how distrackted works, but by having all my stacks in a single file instead of using a file per unique stack? There’s a separate thought in here about the necessity of “boxes” for creativity, but it’s my first week off school and I’m tired, so once my neurons fire again that may whim itself into existence.

I made fishtrackted to see if I could execute on this idea, and to see if I could learn some awk and sed along the way (which I did). For some great resources, check out Grymoire’s awk and sed guides, which helped me quite a bit.

See you next time!