I have been thinking about the question what makes a “good tool”? What are the characteristics that make me comfortable depending on a tool? What makes me delighted to use a tool? Expectations play a crucial role in my experience with a tool. Does this tool do what I expect? Are … | Continue reading
I am glad summer is here, I said to a friend earlier today. The sun was shining through the window after a dull, rainy spell of weather. It started to get dull throughout the day, but the sentiment with which I started my day – the joy of summer’s presence – was rooted in my mind … | Continue reading
I love to take notes of words. I write down words I hear that I think I could use in poetry and words that catch my eye. I sometimes take a note of a word after trying to think of how to express something and guessing what the right word may be. For example, I recently wondered i … | Continue reading
Purple flowers are like nature’s glitter., I said to myself. The season of flowering and growth is here. Where there were buds, there is now colour. I noticed on my walk home today that there are many purple flowers. There is one flower, tall with lots of purple petals, whose nam … | Continue reading
A friend pointed out earlier this week that my website is coming up on being four years old. I replied “Time flies when you are having fun!” Then, ten minutes later, I said “Ahhh four years is a long time.” It feels like yesterday when I was joining my first online website meetup … | Continue reading
Your eyes open to a blue sky on a Sunday morning. Laying in bed, under the softest of covers, you think about the day ahead. “What could I do today?” The most wonderful of questions. With your eyes becoming less heavy as the minutes pass, an idea emerges: I could go to the bookst … | Continue reading
A few weeks ago, I started work on a new design for my website. This new design was based on the theme of ensuring that my words were the main focus of any given web page. With a vague idea in my head of what I wanted my new theme to look like, I spent hours working away on the n … | Continue reading
Last week, after having been awake all night one day after a volunteer engagement, I made my way to a coffee shop at the crack of dawn. I needed a coffee to wake me up. I ordered a flat white and a toastie. I sat down at a bar-like table and ate my toastie, looking through the wi … | Continue reading
On most days, my anxiety is tolerable. Present, but manageable. But every so often there comes a wave of anxiety that is harder to manage. This typically comes after a trigger, like a lack of sleep. Earlier today, I asked myself a familiar question: what did I do to feel better l … | Continue reading
Professionally, I write in Google Docs and then paste my words into another tool: Ghost, for example, or whatever the documentation tool is with which I am working. I do this because Google Docs is an excellent writing tool, with all the features I need to write the words I need … | Continue reading
I have been taking note of design patterns I like. I write these notes in my notebook as a reminder of things I have seen that have inspired me. One that I noted down recently was the pattern of having a rotating set of tips or facts that appear while you are waiting for a page t … | Continue reading
My notebook: a place for my ideas to grow. I came to start thinking about my notebook in this way after a period wherein I decided to think without any particular obligation to bring an idea into reality. I often think about what I could make, then make it: software, essays, docu … | Continue reading
in familiar plains, infinite wonders. | Continue reading
Watching the sunset is one of the pleasures of the day. Today’s sunset caught me by surprise. My anxiety levels have been high over the last few days, deriving from lack of sleep on one night. I have thus been taking it easy, doing what I can to rest and relax. I had been watchin … | Continue reading
Tools influence what we can create, and how we think about creating. With good tools, we can focus on making something detailed and delightful – art, essays, furniture, food, and more. With bad tools, creativity is hindered; stages of the creative process may become a burden. Wit … | Continue reading
Acronyms for song names are commonly used in the r/TaylorSwift Reddit community. For example, DwOHT means Dancing with Our Hands Tied. The use of acronyms sparked a question in my mind: of all possible acronyms derived from the names of Swift's songs, what acronyms are more commo … | Continue reading
The Taylor Swift Reddit commmunity regularly uses acronyms to abbreviate song titles, particularly longer titles. For example, "CIWYW" refers to the song "Call it What You Want" from the Reputation album. Deciphering acronyms, particularly longer ones, is difficult for me. Thus, … | Continue reading
Writing can be many things: a way to clarify one's thoughts, an intellectually gratifying activity that spurs on a new way of thinking, a motivation for sharing stories, among other things. With such delight to be had, writing is a thrilling activity of endless opportunity and le … | Continue reading
I was recently working on a project to plot historical trends showing mentions of a keyword in a given field of interest. For this project, I needed to retrieve abstracts from specific categories (i.e. cs.CV) on Arxiv over periods of time (i.e. the last 180 days). I wrote a scrip … | Continue reading
My bookmarking tool has a feature that automatically retrieves a title when a URL is pasted into the tool. I built this feature to help reduce the friction associated with bookmarking. The workflow I had in mind for this tool was: Paste in a URL A server automatically retrieves t … | Continue reading
A paper titled "Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought", published in Nature, recently caught my eye. Here is an excerpt from the conclusion: Evidence from aphasia research suggests that all tested forms of thought are possible in the absence of langua … | Continue reading
How can I build this interface to do as much for me as possible? is a question that has been on my mind when designing publishing tools lately. In building my own tools, I have been able to stop to think about how the way that I work can be codified in a tool, such that the tool … | Continue reading
The question What does this environment afford? has been on my mind lately, encouraged by my learning about design philosophies from the excellent Universal Principles of Design book. What an environment affords refers to what I am encouraged to do, or discouraged from doing. I h … | Continue reading
head rested on the train window, eyes heavy — the glow of day. | Continue reading
My blog has used the same design – except for a few changes, like adding a background image or changing spacing here and there – for the last year or two. After a conversation with a designer, I have been increasingly thinking about what I like and do not like in web design. This … | Continue reading
When I am writing extensions to large programs, I sometimes like to sketch out my idea in a separate file. In this separate file, I write all the code I need to validate an approach, through which I aim to answer the questions: Is this algorithm going to work? How can I best impl … | Continue reading
Aurora, the static site generator that powers this website, supports an interactive development mode. In this mode, a website is built and a local server is run on which I can view the site. I wrote a blog post about how I built the interactive development mode. When I make chang … | Continue reading
Every so often, I find a Python package that effectively solves a programming problem, or makes the experience of writing programs more delightful. Those tools become part of my repertoire of tools for writing new programs. For example, when I learned about tqdm, a status bar pac … | Continue reading
The publishing process for my blog posts is as follows: I write a blog post in a tool called Typora; I paste the blog post into a web tool I made that has various utilities to help me format my page; The web tool creates a markdown file with my blog post, and; I publish the blog … | Continue reading
Does this tool help me do what I want? is a question that has been at the forefront of my mind of late. It started when I was thinking about the friction into which I was running when staying up to date with academic papers. My previous system involved checking several sources fo … | Continue reading
Before I write, I think about what I want to say. I may reflect on a topic for days in the back of my mind, then take notes. My notes can be as few as a single word, or a sentence or two that may act as a springboard to a new essay. I recently read that much of writing is not wri … | Continue reading
I have spent much of June thinking about the tools I use. My mindset is evolving from using a tool because it is what I have used to thinking about whether tools are allowing me to express myself in the way that I want. These thoughts have taken me down several paths. I have been … | Continue reading
Over the years, I have used many static site generators. I started with Jekyll, whose directory structure was intuitive. But, there were problems: speed as my site grew, and I struggled to learn how to build an extension. The language with which I was most familiar was Python; to … | Continue reading