It’s the beautiful easing into dawn as I write. I’m sitting in a rocking chair on the chapel deck, overlooking one of New York’s finger lakes. In the middle of the quiet and solitude, a speedboat just ripped across the lake as I finished that last sentence. It’s 6:50 a.m. I was up at 5:00, woken by my daughter crying. My back hurts and my neck aches from sleeping on the hard wooden bunk bed of the camp cabin we’re staying in.
Posts in "articles"
Indie Hacking
I have a tendency to be consumed by a niche interest or hobby every now and then. In the past it’s been disc golf, counter strike, yo-yoing, hot sauces, coffee, apologetics, and even card magic. Now I’m introducing the latest interest that my free-time has fallen victim to: indie hacking.
What is Indie Hacking? Despite having “hacking” in the name, indie hacking is not nearly as nefarious as it seems. It does not involve late night attempts to crack the access code to a terminal while 80s synth wave music surges in the background.
Using Tiny Theme Microhooks to make your homepage display a reverse chronological list of long-form articles, grouped by year
I’ve been feeling like my home page wasn’t what I really wanted people’s first experience with my blog to be. I want people to be able to get a high-level overview of what I write about and what my interests are. I admire other blogs that just have a list of long-form articles, so I decided to update my home page to work similarly.
Check out my new home page at weidok.
Street Corner
Today I found myself in the downtown area of an old, little rural Ohio town. Surrounded by brick buildings, with a large, antiquated concrete community bank on the opposite corner. I stopped in at a local Chinese takeout place with my family for lunch. We ordered our food, and were told the customary “10 minutes”. While waiting for them to prepare our food, I stepped out onto the corner with my daughter.
It was… unremarkable. Another typical Ohio day in a quaint Ohio town.
But doing unremarkable things with a one year-old can suddenly make them remarkable.
My Meeting Philosophy
I recently had 35 meetings in a week. This is a lot, but not uncommon for employees of large enterprises. While it is easy to lament an organization’s “meeting culture”, there are also actions individual employees can take to reduce their meeting load. I recognized that attending all the meetings on my calendar was not possible (one time slot was quadruple-booked!) so I developed the following approach for responding to meetings.
26 Pieces Of Advice To My Past Self
I recently turned 26. I’m no sage, but I’ve picked up a couple of lessons in my time. Below are 26 things I would tell a younger me if I could.
A Recommendation for Trying AI
The following is a message I shared with my organization today.
In light of NASA’s push to train up the workforce on AI, I wanted to share a tool that I’ve been using in my day-to-day. This is a simple tool that would be a good introduction for folks who haven’t been using AI much.
Perplexity AI is a conversational AI assistant and search engine that provides citations for sources it is using.
How to Write a Kickass Article
I would like to note that as I write this, I am not following the advice contained within whatsoever.
I want to write better articles. I want to use them to reason and think. I would like to do some research and link to sources, so that my articles have some ground to stand on and they provide real value.
To this end, I’ve been doing some research on writing a good article and I made the cheat sheet below for myself.
Experimentation Is Where the Fun Is At!
My new shipment from The Goulet Pen Company makes it feel like Christmas!
I ordered their notebook sampler and got a random ink sample set for free.
An Analog Blog Post
The following was transcribed from the pictured journal entry. I used Google Lens and a LOT of editing.
It has been easy to not make time to write recently. “Busyness” is the main culprit, but I’ve also been spending time with its less boisterous sibling, distraction. And so here I find myself, back at the roots of my writing practice. The journal. I’ve missed the empty page. The empty screen is nice too, in my writing software of choice, but I can’t help feeling the weight of the myriad windows/apps/messages vying for my attention. So I’ve returned to my empty page. It welcomes my attention and thought, but does not compete for them. It is an escape in plain sight.