What I wish this to be

Some of the problems I'd like to solve with notes like these

  • Blog posts have too much ceremony around them
  • Tweets are ephemeral (In fact, I delete mine regularly)
  • I should do this regularly (related to 1 and 2)

From a technical point of view

  • Build interesting tools for authoring posts
  • Learn some of the strengths and weaknesses of Next.js
  • Figure out an interesting deployment strategy (domains, servers, etc)

See also What I do not wish this to be

Referenced in:
Jotting down a new note
In Genesis I remarked that the hardest part of building a new note was figuring out the filename. npm run jot now builds a file titled like this automatically. TIL the date command. { "scripts": { "jot": "touch notes/$(date '+%Y%m%d%H%M%S')" } } I can now backlink (Backlinks) files with [[]], but I'm not rendering anything yet. I'd like to now think about what I want to build What I wish this to be
Six notes in
I guess based on filename alone (Genesis) I've been writing for 18 minutes. I'm not really building a habit yet (but will be soon What I wish this to be), but that's enough data(?) to start rendering this and seeing how backlinks (and forward links I suppose!) behave. Let's commit.
The joy of yak shaving
The act of shipping software is often hindered by Yak shaving. A fix splinters out into several items, which in turn splinter out into several more items each. It is important to exercise caution of this happening, and chop off the tail when necessary. In personal projects, however, I have found aspects of Yak shaving to be some of the most illuminating parts of programming. Take this blog for instance. I could have just set up Mediawiki for myself. If What I wish this to be were truly limited to just getting words on the web, I would have done so. But I wanted to write code in addition to writing words. So I have found myself doing work that is explicitly not related to getting words in front of people. Building an extension maybe helped me get these words out more quickly, but in reality most of the joy came from learning something new. Hello, next! in the end is responsible for you seeing these words right now, but it was not necessary. I could have written my posts as plain ol' HTML(tm). And it's all very fun! A "simple" project (glorified static site generation) can become a beautiful problem that exposes me to different tools and the frameworks, the amount of which is limited only to wear I draw the line.
Where do notes find themselves?
Possibly nowhere. Notes are expected to be one-off, atomic, and a place for me to expand on things I am thinking about. More on this in What I wish this to be. But, importantly, notes are connected to one another. This is an interesting mechanism for re-purposing past thoughts, and allowing myself to Expand later. It is also a curse. There is a certain "baggage" to writing down a new note, which is very much What I do not wish this to be. Instead, I'd like to just write. Maybe I'll link this somewhere, maybe I'll expand upon it later. I don't know. Maybe I'll orphan it, only visible from the "Referenced in:" sections from the posts above.

What I do not wish this to be

Some guiding failure modes

  • A product (at least for now, I'm not really interested in figuring out and solving for different use-cases)
  • An exercise in self-promotion, I'd like to build this for me
  • Writing notes should not be time-consuming
  • Writing notes should not require an upfront cost
  • Writing notes should not require a maintenance cost