Posts

Johnny Decimal - Organization that Works (for Me)

Unstructured and Undefined

For many years, especially after I left school, I didn’t have a solution to organize files or notes or really anything.

In school, everything was clearly defined, with an obvious hierarchy: Year, Semester, Course, and within each course create folders as needed. I took physical notes, with a folder per class just like the digital systems. Simple, easy, and no need to make it “scalable” - I’m only going to juggle 5 courses at once. Emails were ephemeral - either a notification/update or a simple transaction. The midterm is next Wednesday. Correction for Problem 2 on the assignment. “Please find my assignment attached below”. Any important documents would always be available on the course homepage, no need to keep track of them myself.

So I Tried Helix - And I'm Not Going Back

Nearly a year ago I wrote about trying helix and ended the post with the general opinion that I didn’t need any of the advanced features that these modal editors bring to the table. But I gave it a try anyway, finished the built in tutor, and now I can’t live without it. I still dislike hjkl, but that’s because I’m used to my specific keyboard layout that makes arrow keys easy to access.

I Love Humans

Systems don’t always work. What you need are humans, faith in each other, and a place to put notes.

I recently begen volunteering at a local organization that acts as a permanent mailing address for thousands of people - a critical service that allows people to receive important documents for identification, employment, benefits, and more. How do you manage hundreds of incoming letters/packages a day for thousands of mailboxes? Surely each letter gets scanned and indexed in a database for easy retrieval, and peple can scan their IDs to check for new mail.

Reskilling

Planning an Escape

I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ve hit a dead end in my career.

My current job is the thankless task of maintaining my previous boss’s pet projets. I’m having a horrible time. I can’t move up the chain because I’m not in a real position - just a weird attachment to the department where I don’t belong. My formal education is in Material Science, where all the jobs are in rural/suburban areas, but I can’t live in those places. I’m stuck.

Trying Helix

This is my first time using a terminal, “modal” text editor. I loved tmux so much I decided to try something else modal and in the terminal to edit server configs etc.

I looked into Vim, NeoVim, Emacs (which originally caught my eye with Org-Mode) but they all proved to be too fiddly to get working quickly, and VSCode is fine for my use cases. This is all true of Helix too, but it’s the new kid on the block and I decided to give it a try.

How to Make a Hugo Post

With this theme, anyway.

Mostly for personal reference since it varies by theme.

To make and view a draft post:

$ cd hugo
$ hugo new content posts/how-to-make-a-hugo-post.md
$ nano content/posts/how-to-make-a-hugo-post.md
$ hugo --buildDrafts

The post file context is just normal markdown. If you can write a github README you can write a post.

To make it a non-draft post, set draft: false in the header.

You can change the title in the header as well.