directing my attention -- technical pursuits

Life is really all about what you pay attention to.

As I progress into meditation, I gain insight into how valuable directing and sustaining attention is.

I've also been refreshing on Cal Newport's "Deep Work". This book continues to remind me that a deep, intentional life is a life well lived.

Developers have infinite possibility to what they can create. Even worse, as devs gain more experience and skill, ideas are generated at a higher volume, making it hard to choose what one wants to pursue. I often find myself going down idea rabbit-holes, which, while it's good intellectually, I find that it has been drastically taking away from building and creating.

I want to ensure that I remain intentional in my technological pursuits. Here, for my first, and hopefully not last time, I attempt to capture what my current intentions are, and where I'm directing my attention.

local-first

in a dream world, I would be spending my time creating human-centric local-first apps, tools that put us back into control.

I'm sure I'll write a post about why I believe in local-first, and if I have, I'll link it here. But if I haven't yet, then read Ink & Switch's seminal paper on it: Local First | Ink & Switch (it's so good!)

Mastering architecture

reword beginning of next

hus, it’s most fruitful for me to dive deep into the architecture of local first apps. this is stuff that AI is not necessarily trained on -- considering, there isn't a lot of pre-existing local-first apps to train on in the first place. and, this becomes a sort of cycle, where people build cloud-first apps because AI is good at it, and AI thus becomes better at building cloud-first apps.

this is where I feel the need to step in.

knowing the ins and outs of local first, the caveats, the foundational technologies (ElectricSQL, yjs, automerge etc).

I would love to at some point create a website that elaborately explains and compares of all the current big-players in local-first development (at least in the JS/React world, bc that's as far as my domain reaches for now). Sample implementations, explanations of the data flow. It feels like the current landscape of local-first resources is pretty sparse, and anyone interested in this world will have to do some digging into the weeds for research. I want to shine some light and lift the initial research burden.

(though, I recognize the above is quite a cumbersome task! just speaking this idea into existence for now.)

Mastering the architecture will be invaluable for me when I inevitably build more local-first apps in the future.

Staying away from design

I'm currently building the local-first River Journal. However, I notice that I continue to block myself on development, because I am constantly refining the app's design. I try to build out features, but I struggle because I can't help but notice how poor the app currently looks compared to my fantasized image of it. So, I go into a design rabbit hole.

Good design is incredibly important to me, and I think the frequency to which I get blocked because of design is testament to that.