Monthly Archives: November 2024

How to build traction for your creative endeavor

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: _Micropost 🍪, Creativity

Core cycle:

  • Try hard at something (bonus if it’s hard)
  • Share it, enthusiastically, in public
  • Repeat every week*

Bonus: Find likeminded peers and become good friends with them.

*A week strikes a good balance between consistency and workload.

Plus:

  • If it’s not working, shake it up somehow
    • Try different content
    • Try a different format
    • Try a different venue
    • Intentionally try to improve at the craft
    • Imitate people 1-2 steps above you
    • Artistically steal for everything except the key area of creativity & innovation

This advice comes from a decade+ at failing to build traction for my endeavors, with small pockets of success here and there:

  • Then Tragedy Struck (instrumental metal) — Little traction
  • comfort (wave / trap music) — Medium/little traction
  • timestamps.me — Little traction
  • offlinemark (2012-2019) — Little traction (Twitter)
  • offlinemark (2019-2023) — Medium traction (Blog, Twitter)
  • offlinemark (2024+) — High traction (Youtube)

7 steps towards learning something

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: _Micropost 🍪, Software Development

Here’s my rough mental model around learning things in the world of computer programming:

  1. Never heard of it before
  2. Heard of it, but don’t know what it is
  3. Know what it is conceptually, but not how it works
  4. Know how it works, but never implemented it
  5. Have implemented it, but just for fun, not in production
  6. Implemented something in production
  7. Applied concept creatively in a novel fashion (mastery)

Find your own bugs

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: _Micropost 🍪, _Tech 💻, _Twitter Archive 🐤, Open Source, Software Development

Audio version: https://podcasters.spotify.com/offlinemark/episodes/Find-your-own-bugs-e2i15vc

Contributing to open source is a popular recommendation for junior developers, but what do you actually do?

Fixing bugs is a natural first step, and people might say to look a the bug tracker and find a simple bug to fix. However, my advice would be to find your own bugs.

In 2019, I had some free time and really wanted to contribute to the LLVM project in some way. Working on the actual compiler seemed scary, but LLDB, the debugger, seemed more approachable.

I went to the LLVM Dev Meeting, met some LLDB devs, and got super excited to contribute. I went home, found a random bug on the bug trackers, took a look for all of 30 minutes, then … gave up. Fixing some one else’s random string formatting bug simply wasn’t interesting enough to motivate me to contribute.

3 months later I was doing some C++ dev for fun. I was debugging my code and ran into a really, really strange crash in the debugger. It was so strange that I looked into it further and it turned out to be a bug in LLDB’s handling of the “return” command for returning back to the caller of the current function. The command didn’t correctly handle returning from assembly stubs that don’t follow the standard stack layout/ABI, and caused memory corruption in the debugged process which eventually led to a crash.

This was totally different. I had found a super juicy bug and dedicated a couple weeks to doing a root cause analysis and working with the LLDB devs to create a patch, which was accepted.

So if you want to contribute to open source, I would agree with the common advice to fix some bug, but would recommend finding your own — it will be way more rewarding, fulfilling, and a better story to tell.

—

https://twitter.com/offlinemark/status/1778483168611610940
https://twitter.com/offlinemark/status/1208491737099882496

Why I use 5 different git clients

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: _Micropost 🍪, Git, Software Development

What if I told you you didn’t have to use just one git client? I use 5, and here’s why:

  1. Command line – Sometimes it’s the simplest fastest way to do something.
  2. Lazygit – Ultra-fast workflow for many git tasks, especially rebasing, reordering, rewriting commits. Quickly doing fixup commits and amending into arbitrary commits feels magical. Custom patches are even more magical.
  3. Fork (Mac app) – Great branch GUI view. Nice drag and drop staging workflow.
  4. Sublime Merge – Good for code review, can easily switch between the diff and commit message just by scrolling, no clicks.
  5. Gitk – Great blame navigator.

One you try one of these GUIs, you’ll never go back to git add -p.

Toxic minimalism

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: _Micropost 🍪, Life

If you’ve ever had a painful move due to having too much stuff, you might have had the urge to become a minimalist to avoid an unpleasant experience like that again.

There’s a lot of good things about minimalism and the philosophy of needing less. In addition to being easier to move, it’s better for the environment, and less costly to have & maintain less things.

But watch out — it’s easy to go too far in the other direction and let the minimalism take on a toxic quality, where you don’t even acquire things that you really would find helpful, and would improve the quality of your life.

If you’re in that position, I’d just remind you that it’s ok to acquire a bunch of stuff, learn what is really valuable to you, then trim things down later. Sometimes to go narrow, you first need to go wide.

It’s worth writing, even if someone else covered the topic already

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: _Micropost 🍪, Creativity, Writing

It’s worth writing, even if someone else on the internet has covered the topic already, because:

  1. Writing helps you understand the topic better
  2. Your tone, communication style, or perspective might appeal more to some readers than the original source
  3. It helps build your public body of work, which makes you luckier

And writing is just an example — replace it with whatever form of self-expression you’d like.