Stuck in the middle with you

Stuck in the middle with you

Hey everyone,

This is the title of an old song by Stealers Wheel that serves as the theme song for this newsletter. That's because parts of the song's lyrics seem appropriate for this month's newsletter.

This past month, I've regularly felt like hitting a wall when working on something new. At times, I felt as though I knew nothing. All the various technology components needed to get something working felt overwhelming. Sometimes, I got stuck on a detail that I thought would take an hour or two. Instead, I found myself still trying to find a solution two or three days later.

Trying to make some sense of it all
But I can see that it makes no sense at all

I started to recognize these impasses, and usually, that meant I had to take a step back and return to the basics. By "basics", I mean learning more about the technology by watching some videos or taking a course.

There is a pattern emerging when I go through these learnings.

Step 1. First, I find some good search terms on Kagi.com. After tweaking the terms a bit, I fixate the search results on tab 1 of my browser. I then skim through each result, using the Kagi search as a kind of inventory for sources to evaluate. I explicitly mention Kagi because they recently introduced an unlimited plan, and their search results are geared more towards me than towards advertisers or clickbait farms.

Step 2. Once I've chosen a course—whether it's a video, a series of blog posts, or an actual Udemy or Coursera course—I work across three desktops. (Linux has a great feature allowing for multiple desktops.)

1. Screen 1 is for the course material.
2. Screen 2 is for my own experiments where I try out practical examples. I always make a point to implement my own little program and not just blindly follow the instructor.
3. Screen 3 is a document where I jot down my learnings. I use LibreOffice for this. I often cut and paste code fragments or take screen captures. I make sure to write it in a way that allows me to revisit the document months later and quickly catch up without having to go through the course again.

I recently gathered all these learning folders from my various projects and was amazed by how many I found:

• Bootstrap - A popular front-end framework for building responsive websites.
• JavaScript - A widely-used programming language for web development.
• Newsletters - ButtonDown newsletter software.
• Ruby (For Selenium) - Ruby bindings for Selenium WebDriver for browser automation.
• Bubble - A no-code platform for building web applications.
• Jekyll - A static site generator built in Ruby.
• Rails - A web application framework written in Ruby.
• Tailwind - A utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom user interfaces.

And I'm wondering what it is I should do
It's so hard to keep this smile from my face
Losing control, yeah, I'm all over the place

Note taking

One thing I'm still struggling with is note-taking. The best I can do is write everything down in a linear format, but that has its limits. My original Ruby On Rails training doc ended up being 60+ pages long, so I had to go back and restructure a lot of the content, and toss out things that had become obsolete or obvious. Tools like Obsidian claim to offer better knowledge structuring, but I haven't spent any time exploring them yet.

Open source stands out

During last month's exploration, I was continually amazed by the incredible minds contributing to all these open-source projects. I'm clearly standing on the shoulders of many giants who've created these wonderful tools. With my new friends like Kagi, Copilot, ChatGPT, and Phind, the term "solo entrepreneur" doesn't seem to do justice to the countless hours of value-creating work that's led to great software like Linux, PostgreSQL, Rails, Jekyll, Tailwind, and so on. Outside of Wikipedia and Creative Commons projects, I can't think of any other field or industry that has achieved such great results.

Well, my friends, I hope this all leads to some fantastic products and new discoveries I can share.

Well you started out with nothing,
And you're proud that you're a self made man,
And your friends, they all come crawlin,
Slap you on the back and say,
Please.... Please.....

See you next month!