miso

It's been raining all day and it's getting pretty cold. I'm going through difficult times and it seems the weather reflects how I'm feeling internally. I'm trying to hang on to simple things, like listening to music, walking, exercising. I've meditated twice today. I wanted to build a new python application but I can't find the motivation to do it. I feel both restless and tired. I think I should just take some vacation, those gloomy sundays aren't my favorites.

I'm bad at pursuing positive habits. Take meditation for instance. I always go back to it whenever I feel bad, do it for a few days in a row, and when things are getting better I stop. It's very hard to incorporate it when things are doing well. The problem with that is that I never get to build up enough momentum to ripe the real benefits. Same happens for the gym. I used to go there a lot, then stopped mostly, and now I go every now and then. But again, I go because I know I need to, not because of a positive habit.

I just got out of meditating for the first time in month. Not long, 10 minutes. Before doing it I felt like it was a real chore. Sitting 10 minutes doing nothing? Man, my brain can't comprehend that. 10 minutes later I feel so much more rested, calm, in the moment. But I know that next time I will meditate I will still see it as a chore before I get to do it.

Actually it's the same for writing. How long will I still be writing on here? I hope a long time because I feel better after doing it, but who knows? Entropy, right? After a while, things get back to their initial position.

If I reflect a little, I think I can do things like meditation or gym on days where I don't have things to do. When work comes, it takes over the better part of the day. I need to wake up very early, get thinking about the day and meetings, finish late and go home to rest. It's just incredibly tough to make the time. My work-life balance is definitely broken.

That's another concept I'm not very fan of. Work-life balance. I don't want to separate the two. My work is part of who I am. I don't see it as work, it's something I like to do — but that stresses the hell out of me most of the time — still I enjoy it. I'm not looking to build fences between it and the rest of my life, I just need to find a healthier use of my time. Thus meditating? I'll keep you posted!

It's always been hard for me to speak about myself. I think part of it is because I don't want people judging me, but I'm not sure. All I know is it's always been tough to open-up. But when your name isn't there, it becomes much easier. It's quite liberating to use a pseudonym actually. You can write without fearing people coming back to you. It removes constraints. It removes the notion of who you are to only focus on what you say. Why did we lose pseudonyms on the web?

As I was drinking coffee this morning I headed to read.write.as to read and get inspired. I opened one post from inquiry and got very surprised to see that I've been quoted there. It's great to see people actually ready and comment on what happens.

But simple attention arithmetic suggests everyone constantly writing means they have proportionally less time for reading.

I'd tend to agree with you. However I think a lot of people simply read and never write. And that's probably for a reason: in order to engage with something it takes effort. Someone needs to formulate their thoughts, put it down, send it. It's not easy. I guess that's why there are a lot of one-click like systems (such as claps on medium). It shows engagement, but i'm not sure how meaningful it is.

So anyway, as I saw I was mentioned I realized that 1) it's very cool and 2) there's 99% chances I could've missed that if I didn't happen to read that particular post at that particular time. Now, I'm very new to even the concept of blog federation (fediverse, mastodon?), but do these systems allow you to know you've been mentioned so that you can keep an engaging discussion going?

And maybe I don't need to know that information. Perhaps it's part of the beauty of it: if you happen to read something you are interested in you can comment on it by writing a post. If the stars align the original author can see it too, but otherwise that's fine.

I got back to writing recently. I'm not sure exactly why, but I felt like jotting down my thoughts was helping me organise my thoughts and learnings. I like that when you write you create something. That something can be shared, used, interpreted. It's a simple act but so complex at the same time. Anyway, I first went back to Medium. I love the idea behind it — a platform where writers can connect and share stories — but I got disappointed by the paywall they've set-up. It feels as if the articles you write there belong to Medium. It's also not ideal to share Medium links since at times people already reached their reading limits and can't read what you wrote without paying. Not good, right?

I checked other platforms. One that've been there a while is svbtle. I think that one inspired other writing platforms. It's well designed, however it's now getting old and I'm afraid there aren't a lot of new things coming. They don't have a network of people who can discover your post when you write one unlike medium. I think that's a big drawback actually. I checked a bunch of others like blot.im or listed.co. They're all good, but have the same issue as svbtle — no real network of people to share the content.

It feels to me like write.as is medium done right. The idea of a network of people writing good content, discovering good stories. It seems like it's done with the right mindset and I'm looking forward to use it more, and share some of my uninteresting thoughts here now!

To understand a problem fully, I need to visualize it. To map it. I need space to group thing together. I feel like simply writing is very limitating. Keeping it all in your head doesn't help either. That's why I've always been a huge fan of diagraming.

It's a big part of understanding problems for me. The beauty of it is that we can diagram anywhere. Whiteboards, paper, or on software. Then we can share those diagrams with people and it makes it much more easy for them to understand as well. Everyone wins.

Today I have tried Figma, which I wanted to try for a while. What I like about it is its accessibility – we can use it directly from the browser without needing to download anything. But also that it has collaboration and prototyping directly out of the box. Anyway, I wanted to use it for diagraming and sharing those diagrams.

After some research I came across Flowkit. It's a library of flow component available on both Sketch and Figma. It's been very intuitive and fun to use, and I feel like the results are very good looking. I'm looking forward to using that more in the future, and incorporating Figma as a part of my day-to-day whenever I want to visualize something.

Some idea I'd like to explore in the future is to bring together diagrams and prototype. In Figma it's possible to attach different frame together through hot points, and I think this could be a great way explore diagrams and add context. That way, we could have high-level views and allow to dive into specific parts.

It would look a little like that. As you can see, there's one node we can click. When we click on it we are taken to a lower-level diagram. Then I linked the ending node back to the upper level one.