Online certifications, training courses, or other learning resources can be a mixed bag. It’s unclear how much employers value them, and it can also feel overwhelming trying to retain all of the information presented. When I was doing datacamp after my day job each day, I often felt like I was trying to get to the finish line as quickly as possible, rather than actually focusing on the process of learning. After three years of doing coding practice/learning on the side, I have been reflecting on why I learned so much more with exercism than datacamp.

We consume and generate, a lot of information per day. With more people using the internet and generating data around the world, there will be even more communication: more emails sent, more articles written, and more data to store and recall. During the period 2011 through 2021, the percentage of individuals worldwide using the internet almost doubled, from 31.2% to 59.6% [1]. People are joining the interconnected infrastructure of the modern web at a blistering pace, and yet there are still billions more that remain unconnected. When they too join the global network, we can expect even more ideas to join the chorus.

When I first began migrating repositories from GitHub to Codeberg, the first thing I noticed was that vercel does not support codeberg as a git integration. I like vercel for a lot of reasons, but most of all the ability to preview a build of the site without deploying it to production. Additionally, if something does go seriously wrong, I can always rollback to a previous deployment that was working while I troubleshoot the cause. Using the command line tool for vercel I was able to still deploy just fine but I risked the codebase getting out of sync with the deployments.

This weekend, I changed my neovim configuration from nvchad to kickstart nvim. The primary reason was that the level of abstraction in nvchad was a bit too much, and I wanted a single init.lua file in which I could comfortably add plugins through lazy.nvim. I hadn’t recognized it up until now, but not fully appreciating the structure for the config was presenting a significant barrier to further making my setup my own. Not only was kickstart neovim incredibly easy to setup, I have been able to tweak so many things that I had put off of the past year because I now have a much better handle on how to implement those changes. Throughout this experience, I learned more about the trade-offs of complexity, and reflected on how my neovim adventures differed from revamping my website with 11ty. In one instance I was building from the top down — I took a template and began to strip away and tweak the components I didn’t need. In the other, I removed most of the complexity and started from a more bare bones configuration to build off of.

Email aliases have hit the mainstream over the past couple of years, with services such as Firefox relay, and integrated alias support from Fastmail and Proton. In this post, I’m going to share my experience using a custom domain for email aliases, and the things to consider if you are debating between using a custom domain for you email aliases.

I like reading blogs from around the web in either miniflux or russ and for a while I thought it was just because they both used catppuccin[1]. However, I now think that it is because the reading environment is less cluttered, and there is nothing between me and the text that the author wrote. The web has become so cluttered that reading just text in a quiet environment with no bells and whistles feels like relaxing on an island with a good book and a cool glass of ice water.

I have been on a journey recently to discover more terminal tools. Having them close by while working in things like neovim reduces the number of times that I need to bounce around in the browser or the number of applications that I need to install on my machine. Currently I just use alacritty, firefox, and thunderbird and that’s pretty much it. Today I added taskwarrior to the growing list of applications I can use from within the terminal.

There is a distinctive feeling that comes with travelling, a blend of discomfort and excitement about leaving what is known and venturing into what is not. In airplanes, we have time to think, or to truly enjoy a book or an album, purely because there is nothing else to do. Without connection to the internet, there is nothing new to discover, only new things to appreciate in what we already have.

Over the past few months, I finished Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. Solidly in the self-help category, this book was more a reminder than a lesson, but one important takeaway that I had was around the paradox of choice. Even in a world of abundance, we still face the key constraint of time, and this single element of our lives inherently limits the scope of what we can achieve. The term “paradox of choice”, first popularized by Barry Schwartz in a book by the same name, has even more significance in a world that is digital, fast-paced, and rooted increasingly on comparison and expectation. We all know and recognize that it impossible to live a perfect life, yet we may be tempted to maximize our life to the best of our ability. We do this against a backdrop that feels like a never-ending series of choices. I could be doing so many things right now, how can I possibly know that writing a blog post is the best action to take.

I have been working on transitioning more of my sites to Codeberg after becoming a member, and today was the day that I took the plunge into using their hosted Woodpecker CI instance. You have to apply for access by submitting an issue to the requests repository, however the process was very quick and painless. Within a few days I had been approved and had access.