Learning has always been hard

I’ve always found that learning a new skill takes time and effort. It helps that I normally learn things that I enjoy, but even so it’s tough to learn a little more calculus, start learning javascript, tackle learning Spanish or French.

I find that letting the grind be hard, being okay with slow progress, this is a mindset game that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.

Getting to 70% Is Easy Now

The last time I learned a new language well enough to feel confident every day in it, it was golang.

I’ve been learning svelte recently. It’s so much harder, not because Svelte’s bad or anything but because I can ask Claude for a “code sample” and the next thing I know I’m eight commits down and have most of what I want and the part that’s left is both hard to get Claude to build and hard for my own skills to approach because I haven’t trained them.

Learning is 95% Doing

I have a tool that genuinely makes it easy to remove the “doing” part from learning a new framework. I feel like I feel when I eat cheap carbs: I know they will make me put on weight, I know that’s basically bad for me, I know they’re delicious in a way that fibrous greens aren’t.

Am I putting on brain-fat? Getting brain-weak and brain-lazy? I know I’ve seen smart people, much smarter than me, who I’d charactertise today as brain-lazy because they’ve started mistaking conversations with ChatGPT for thinking through a problem, started sharing unedited conversations and trying to persuade me they’re a whitepaper.

In Praise of a Shitty First Draft

I think the book “bird by bird” is the one that contains the “In praise of a shitty first draft” essay. It talks you through acknowledging internally that writing something good isn’t the hard part, it’s finishing anything at all. The productivity people seem to get to the same idea: you should lower your standards for your first attempt because it’s hard enough just to finish.

My first attempt at a sveltekit app works and does 70% of what I want 70% of the time, and all it cost me was that I didn’t write a line of it. That last 30% is a hard wall to climb when my skills haven’t been developed.

My skills haven’t been developed. They’re not developing when I let Claude prototype and prototype until I stop.

I’m seeing how to get brain-obese, and I’m watching opinions on that obesity evolve in our community.

Remember the first time you saw the Chauncey Morlan photo, the 1890s circus dude who was billed as the heaviest man on the planet, and you thought to yourself “damn, I see people bigger than that on the street these days”? We’re used to living our lives obese, seeing obese neighbours and coworkers, feeling uncomfortable without knowing how much better it can be.

Our brains, our minds, we can get comfortable with this shitty normalisation there too. You see people now who argue not only that never-before seen levels of obesity are perfectly ordinary, they’re latching on to interesting ideas like the aquatic ape and twisting it into explanations of humanity to make the argument that the non-obese are the problem, the unusual ones historically.

We’ll get used to people not completing thoughts, not being able to complete thoughts, not able to design an end to end workflow, not thinking through problems. We’re already letting ourselves have Claude write the code, have Claude and CoPilot perform the code review, have them resolve their own meaningless observations, chase their own tails.

Or, just maybe I’m getting old

The fear I have here is remembering the headlines of a hundred, two hundred years ago. Vicemius Knox must surely have felt fear when he wrote “If it is true, that the present age is more corrupt than the preceding, the great multiplication of Novels probably contributes to its degeneracy.”

Am I being scared by a change in behaviour that’ll basically all come out in the wash? Hard to say, hard to say, hard to say. Maybe society changes, maybe some people do stop being able to write code using some approaches that I think have merit. Who am I to say what approaches have merit, though? Surely Linus or Kate or my friend Doug would all look at what I write and recognise that I’m barely software literate.

It’s all so much to take in.

I woke up today wondering how charm’s logger library (https://github.com/charmbracelet/log) actually handles log levels. I know they have some levels predefined in an enum, but what’re they doing with that? This is relevant to #golang #opensource #programming #readingcode

logger.Log is the natural entrypoint, as it’s the actual code doing the logging https://github.com/charmbracelet/log/blob/1e6353e3ca793f1177148e09f990ef220e19b037/logger.go#L56

It dispatches to logger.handle, which has this curious setup:

func (l *Logger) handle(level Level, ts time.Time, frames []runtime.Frame, msg interface{}, keyvals ...interface{}) {

	var kvs []interface{}
	if l.reportTimestamp && !ts.IsZero() {
		kvs = append(kvs, TimestampKey, ts)
	}

	if level != noLevel {
		kvs = append(kvs, LevelKey, level)
	}

I think this means that no matter your log level, whether the log will print or not, the logger always constructs a log line for you, unless you match the noLevel?

As a note, noLevel is private, but is defined as math.MaxInt32. This probably means the most efficient way to generate no logs is to declare your own equivalent noLog level as a default, but I can come back to that in a few paragraphs.

So how do the logs get written? Scanning to the end of the function, it’s this straightforwards l.b.WriteTo(l.w). l is a pointer to the logger struct, b is a bytes.buffer inside that logger, and it’s written out to whatever destination is stored in an io.writer called w.

So if we can understand how b get populated, we’ve cracked how these logs are written. The answer is in this switch statement, though it’s indirect:

	switch l.formatter {
	case LogfmtFormatter:
		l.logfmtFormatter(kvs...)
	case JSONFormatter:
		l.jsonFormatter(kvs...)
	default:
		l.textFormatter(kvs...)

Each of these formatters accepts responsibility for populating the buffer with an appropriately formatted log output. The logfmtFormatter, for example, begins with e := logfmt.NewEncoder(&l.b), accepting a reference to the buffer.

So, that’s the story. Logs are appended to a key value store, which is handed to a formatter that writes formatted output to a buffer on the logger, which is then written.

I’ll come back to the question of figuring out if the best performing no-opt logger is setting hte logLevel to math.MaxInt32 in my next post about this.

My first goal today is to look at PlayTechnique’s website, simplify the front page to a clearer “this could be a business you trust” message, and figure out what layout works for the combination of blog posts and project docs that’re on there.

My second goal is to begin the Jinx rewrite I’ve been avoiding for a year. Jinx is such a great workflow for dockerised Jenkins, it’s a shame not to finish it up and get it released. I want it to meet my original goal of rails-like cli for Jenkins containers.

I worked with John Arundel for a few months at the beginning of last year, the dude who runs Bitfield Consulting.

I told him my ambition: to run my own little software shop. He told me I’d do well to start by running a consultancy and using that to get familiar with people’s problems.

To this day, I find the advice hard to swallow. I want to write my own little programs and be happy. I think he’s right, though, that I’d be better off selling my time for myself instead of selling it for a salary.

Cal Newport wrote in Deep Work that people who can concentrate are becoming a lost commodity, people who can read and read until they understand are becoming valuable. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know I spent a lot of last year just regaining my ability to focus. I was sober for about 9 1/2 months, I made myself spend more time reading, I got medications for some focus issues.

I dream; I dream and dream and get frustrated when it hasn’t helped. It’s time to take advice from Kai Greene instead. He said in a great documentary that a world class body builder isn’t the most knowledgeable person in the room; they’re the person who built out small habits, one day at a time.

Here’s a beautiful quote from him:

Those star moments that fill the highlight reels and leave the audience in awe to watch, those seconds are built on thousands and thousands and thousands of hours…basic fundamentals being applied over and over and over again. Getting up a certain time, doing certain things, cooking your meals, keeping the disciplines, keeping a checklist. Those are the things that string together to make a day of efficient action.

The more of those days of efficient action you string together, the more likely you are to succeed.

Last year in January I wanted to blog more. I wanted to do it in html, css and javascript, but without the tediousness of maintaining index.html lists of all the pages I’d written. I wrote a webserver to handle lots of boilerplate andrew, wrote posts on playtechnique.io and I was satisfied.

The truth is, though, PlayTechnique looks like a personal blog, not a business:

I started PlayTechnique, my LLC. I failed, though, in getting revenue through PlayTechnique.

2025 goals

Finally finish Alan Moore’s book Jerusalem

I’ve been about 670,000 words in since March-ish and really want to get that last 330,000 words read. The second arc, though, was a real distraction from what I loved in the first.

PlayTechnique makes money

I need to stop being scared of the best advice I received: to be self-employed, start as a consultant.

Commercial Software, Gwendolyn!

As above, but instead of consulting I want to release things people buy. That sounds lovely.

javascript’s a reality: it’s time to learn it

I’ve always been an old unix stick in the mud, enjoying languages that traditionally build CLIs, but gosh I need to get past it and into javascript and frameworks.

I finally learn to touch type

I can touch type, but not properly. I use weird fingering, with a bias towards a few fingers. I bought a keyboard.io split keyboard to fix this with.

I put on the beef

I’m decently strong for a natural, self-taught lifter, but I’m not lean. I want muscularity to be my thing. My blocker here’s primarily not knowing how to transition from Diet to daily maintenance without immediately putting on fat.