Truly accept the meaninglessness of life. Then choose a meaning for yourself. Here’s a good one: help reduce the amount of suffering in the world. Millions of people around the world are in a constant state of suffering (poverty, homelessness, war, mental issues, etc.); they’re not lucky enough to have their fundamental needs met in order to contemplate the meaning of life. Help just one of them to have a better life (donate, volunteer, mentor, ...). It shouldn’t be too hard; look around you.
> For whatever reason I'm more motivated to maintain something I've built myself as compared to previous attempts with medium and such. The freedom to do whatever I want, however I want is nice. I can present things simply, with little to no adornment, avoid pushing trackers and ads on people, explicitly release my content under whatever copyright I want, etc.
Totally agree. For my blog (https://faical.dev) I have a very similar setup (S3 & Cloudflare) with HTML generated from Markdown using a small command line tool I built (https://github.com/ftchirou/article). For publishing, I push a Markdown file to a repo and a Bitrise workflow takes care of generating the HTML and uploading to S3.
- No work apps/tools on personal devices (Slack, Google, Jira, etc.)
- No matter what, close your work laptop at 5pm (or whatever time your hard stop is). Any pending work/emergency eating you will still be there the next day.
I learned functional programming many years ago, by reading the book COMMON LISP: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation by David S. Touretzky [1]. Incredible book, super beginner friendly; the chapter on Recursion in particular is one of my favourites. :)
I designed a programming language and wrote an interpreter for it [1] for fun without a formal CS education. I started a series of articles [2] to teach people everything they need to do the same. Give it a try :).
