W23 2024: Ebb and flow
Last week, I felt like I gained superpowers with regards to making progress. This week, the superpowers vanished, poof.
Mission website revamp
I decided to switch to another domain provider as my previous one was charging a higher price for renewal (happening a month from now). I initiated a domain transfer, which requires getting an Auth Code. It took 3 DAYS just to receive that.
I had a solid mental plan for this revamp, and this delay derailed that plan. This waiting period somehow forced me into waiting mode - I started avoiding other projects, even ones that weren't related to the website. If I somehow got started on something, I couldn't make progress and gave up.
I received the Auth Code on Friday and proceeded with the transfer, which should complete sometime in the coming week! With this the waiting mode faded away, and I picked up pace over the weekend.
I moved the hosting of this site from Netlify to GitHub Pages, and have been experimenting with a different theme + static site generator.
A cool project idea?
For some reason, my attention went to my Reading List this weekend. I have some pretty cool articles saved there, that I've either half-read or not touched at all.
I was thinking of ways how I could make the process more enjoyable, and I was reminded of times I used to annotate and write notes in the margins of textbooks in school.
Bringing that feeling online sounded like fun, and I started a hypothes.is account to do so.
Hypothesis works really well, however it didn't match the exact experience of writing notes in the margins. This spawned off a tiny project, which I'll write about in a separate post. I do have some reflections about it to share here though.
Working on this project was a different experience than other stuff I've written. I was coding mainly in JavaScript (a language I don't use very often) and I wasn't too clear on the final result of the project. This sounds like the perfect recipe for failure - I change the scope too many times and eventually give up - and I was close.
However, I managed to take a step back, decide on a set of features, and posted a demo within the Recurse Center community as a checkpoint. RC has been a supportive place to share stuff in an incomplete or not polished state, and I'd eventually like to get more comfortable doing so here on this blog.
Reflections
As I'm writing this, I'm realizing this was actually a pretty standard week, but it felt a lot worse because I kept comparing with how the previous week went. I did do things, just not in the way I expected. And that's okay.
On the other hand, managing to pull myself out of the "give up" stage of a project is not something I would usually do, so maybe I still have some superpowers left?