It's been close to 3 weeks since I released the initial version of the everything page. That was quite a lot of effort that initially felt like great progress, with strides forward re-writing some important foundational code, and also massively reducing build times, but ultimately ended in disapointment and frustration as I ran out of Github build minutes while there were still way to many bugs.

Well I spent the rest of the month finding bugs, re-writing portions of affected code, getting ready for this month's build minutes reset. I also wrote an interesting new feature called incremental progressive rendering, which still needs to be tested, merged and deployed. I wrote a lot of blog posts offline, all stored in git because I had no build minutes so couldn't publish them. Such are the difficulties when you are self hosting, building your own platform, and very low on resources. I did write a blog series about my static site generator and a post exploring the strategic long term vision for the project. Pretty happy with both of those.

So the build minutes reset a couple of days ago, and I was ready to hit the ground running. It's been quite a stressful few days, first getting all the content I wrote offline the past 3 weeks published. Then finishing the testing, debugging, merging and deploying the everything page fixes to the main website.

The basic structure is essentially complete, and the page looks pretty good even with minimal styling. The plan is to progressively enhance the styling. The key thing is that all post types are interleaved in reverse chronological order by day. But the links for each day are in a separate section so you can skim through them easier, and to draw focus to the blog posts and notes. All that said, there were a couple of really tricky things that came up.

First the npm module cache in the build and deploy github action started misbehaving badly. There's some weird stuff happening where the cache doesn’t always clear, sometimes you have to completely turn it off. So many build minutes lost f-ing around getting it working. Like almost 1/2 of this months minutes.

Second, there was this really strange fractal rendering bug, EJS inside code snippets were mistakenly being rendered. Really difficult to figure out what was going on. Not helped by the fact that the bug in a very strange way was mirroring some difficult things happening to me in RL. Another build minutes suck.

I ended up starting to use semantic versioning for all plugins, so I can quickly see which are getting loaded at runtime. This helped with the cache problems. Still an awkward manual process, but I can automate that at some point. I also have a feature in the backlog to implement reusable deploy workflows. That should harmonize workflows and help with the build minutes thing.

Things I'm looking to style:

• Easier to read, remove the bullets on notes and blog posts
• Visually distinguish between post types, maybe something simple at first like different colour boxes that surround posts
• Distinguish between self links so it’s obvious that it’s a link to a blog / newsletter / podcast post
• Better use of space, the left margin looks a bit weird
• Update post header fonts, and font sizes

Probably other things I haven't noticed yet. Happy to have v2 it done. Quite the effort. Feeling drained, hungry and thirsty.

The human brain and mind is something we are intimately aware of yet we take it for granted since they mediate our every action in the world. It's important to be aware of thought dynamics that arise, but without getting too caught up in it. It's especially relevant when you make a living primarily using your brain.

I previously wrote about some memory and perception issues I had while reading. That was a kind of difficult piece to write about, but it helped me understand more fully how my mind works. It's possible that it improved the situation somewhat, but to be honest it's not something I've thought about much since writing the piece.

With that in mind, I really enjoyed Lex Fridman's recent podcast interview with memory researcher and expert Charan Ranganath. There's so much to learn from their discussion to help demistify the grey matter in between your ears, in that skull we all carry around everywhere.

Memory weirdnesses are just part of being human, even if they can be a bit embarrassing and confusing. The way we think about the brain and mind has changed dramatically, even since I was young. These are no longer taboo topics. I think that's great, and this progress has been possible in part by people freely sharing their experiences.

I thought these two stories from Lex were particulatly interesting and fun. I have similar things that have happened to me.

The first is all about how our brains remember things in very strange ways sometimes. It's not like a button you press, like with electronics or a computer, it's more like our brains have a mind of their own, and actually, they do!

I remember, a good friend of mine Joe Rogan. I was on his podcast, we were randomly talking about soccer…football…somebody I grew up watching, Diego Armando Maradona, one of the greatest soccer players of all time, and we were talking about him and his career and so on, and Joe asked me if he was still around, and I said ‘yeah’. I don’t know why I thought yeah.

That was a perfect example of memories. He passed away, I tweeted about it, how heart broken I was, all this kind of stuff, like a year before. I know this, but in my mind, I went back to the thing I’ve done many times in my head, visualising some of the epic runs he had on goal, and so on, so for me he’s alive. And also, part of the conversation when you are talking with Joe, there’s stress, and the focus is allocated, the attention is allocated in a particular way. But when I walked away, I was like, "in which world was Diego Maradona still alive?

Because I was sure, in my head that he was still alive. It’s a moment that sticks with me. I’ve had a few like that in my life. Obvious things…like, disappear from mind. And it’s cool. It shows the power of the mind in a positive sense, to erase memories you want erased, maybe. But I don’t know, I don’t know if that’s a good explanation for that. (01:01:44)

The second story is a reminder that our life situation, and that of others has a big impact on how our brains work. That's to be expected, we are shaped by the things we do day in day out:

There’s a good percentage of time I personally live in the imagined world. I do thought experiments a lot […] sometimes it’s rigorous thought experiments, sometimes it’s fun ones. I imagine that has an effect on how I remember things. And I suppose I have to be a little bit careful to make sure stuff happened vs stuff that I just imagined happened.

And also, some of my best friends are characters inside books, that never even existed. There’s some degree to which they actually exist in my mind. (01:09:37)

Both these stories cheered me up a bit, so I figured I'd share them here. It's a great conversation, worth spending the time to listen to the whole episode.