Curation / The Stream

The anti-social media stream. Otherwise known as my personal feed. Similar to Linus's stream by Linus Lee.

May 3, 2024, 12:25 AM

Students Have the Right to Protest Apartheid

From The Progressive: Students Have the Right to Protest Apartheid. My lovely fiancé wrote a piece about the student protests for Palestine.

While the Republican-led Congress has used its power to condemn any protests on behalf of Palestinians, where was the same outrage and zealousness when white nationalists came to college campuses?
Apr 24, 2024, 6:16 PM
TIL importmap

I forked a small demo from Wes Bos and ran in on my own sandbox. It seems much cleaner than using a script tag per each dependency, and works on all major browsers.

In my little demo app, I placed the importmap in the head of the document. I’m using react as well as my own utils file to test out the functionality.
```
<script type="importmap">
  {
    "imports": {
      "react-dom": "https://esm.sh/react-dom",
      "react": "https://esm.sh/react",
      "utils": "./utils.js"
    }
  }
</script>
```
Read more about importmap on MDN

From there, I imported these libraries in a script module.
```
<body>
  <div id="app"></div>
  <script type="module">
    /* eslint-disable */
    import { useState } from "react";
    import { createRoot } from "react-dom";
    import { formatMoney } from "utils";
    createRoot(document.querySelector(`#app`)).render(formatMoney(100.2365));
  </script>
</body>
```
I had a hiccup with [plugin:vite
] as I found countless others have, so I wrote a custom bun server to host this project. Hopefully there’s a better setup I can find with Vite using importmap in the future.

Apr 23, 2024, 9:32 PM

Start and end of day offsets for current system time zone offset using Luxon

Luxon datetime library defaults startOf and endOf methods to UTC. But this isn’t great for end users who don’t live in UTC / GMT. To offset this, we need to grab the time zone offset from the user’s system.

const systemTimeZoneOffsetInMinutes = new Date().getTimezoneOffset();  
const systemTimeZoneOffsetInHours = systemTimeZoneOffset / 60;

Then we can add the offset to the Luxon datetime object.

const now = DateTime.now();
const startOfLocalDay = now.startOf('day').plus({ hours: systemTimeZoneOffsetInHours });
const endOfLocalDay = now.endOf('day').plus({ hours: systemTimeZoneOffsetInHours });

Apr 18, 2024, 11:14 PM

The "Boring" Stack

I was listening to this podcast: The boring JavaScript stack featuring Kelvin Omereshone (K.O.O) (JS Party #319). My takeaway is I should be using a boring stack to build my business ideas. Leave the shiny new toys for tinkering and use something stable.

While Kelvin talks about the benefits of using Sails, I was thinking about the other “boring” things that constitute a boring stack. It goes beyond tecnologies, like how to run a business, how to organize your team, and how to market the product. And when those things are boring, they are unsexy and oftentimes neglected.

Related: Kelsey Hightower’s nocode

The best way to write secure and reliable applications. Write nothing; deploy nowhere.

Apr 15, 2024, 10:22 PM

Obsidian Templater - Updating Properties on Daily Notes

I wrote a script that updates my daily notes to add properties. Since I’ve been using Obsidian for awhile, properties was introduced much later. I’ll walk through my code.

// Get the current file title, which is in a common date format: YYYY-MM-DD
const currentFileTitle = tp.file.title;

// Set folder you want to get latest file for here
const folder = "Calendar/Personal Reviews/journal and daily review/2022";

// Get all files in that folder, including nested folders
const filesInFolder = app.vault.getMarkdownFiles().filter(file => {
    return file.path.startsWith(folder);
});

// Sort files by file name
filesInFolder.sort((a, b) => a.basename < b.basename ? 1 : -1);

// Get the index of the current file
const currentIndex = filesInFolder.findIndex(file => file.basename === currentFileTitle);

// Get basename of previous and next TFiles to be used in link
let previousEntry = '';
let nextEntry = '';

// Wrap it around a try catch block in case there's something wrong with getting these basenames
try {
    previousEntry = `[[${filesInFolder[currentIndex + 1].basename}]]`
} catch (err) {
    console.error(err);
}
try {
    nextEntry = `[[${filesInFolder[currentIndex - 1].basename}]]`
} catch (err) {
    console.error(err);
}

Here’s my template that the templater plugin uses in markdown.

<%*This is where the JS code above is inserted-%>
---
tags: 
    - logs/daily 
created: <% currentFileTitle %>
previousEntry: 
    - "<% previousEntry %>"
nextEntry:
    - "<% nextEntry %>"
---

I’ve had to modify this depending if the file already has properties or not.

Apr 12, 2024, 6:59 PM

Elicit UX

I got a chance to play around with Elicit and was reading through Adam Wiggin’s Tweet. I think I might make a quick web app trying multi-column queries about a particular topic and allow more of a computational style of conversational chat.

Computational style of conversational AI using Elicit

Apr 11, 2024, 10:37 PM

Setting up SVGR with Jest

I was getting some errors in my unit test output because I converted my SVGs to React components using SVGR. As such, I needed to re-configure Jest accordingly.

Create the mock file

export default "svgr-div"; // This is the kebab case that jest is looking for
export const ReactComponent = "div";

// @see https://react-svgr.com/docs/jest/ for setup

Configure jest in package.json

{
  "jest": {
    "moduleNameMapper": {
      "\\.svg": "<rootDir>/PATH_TO_FOLDER/svg.js"
    }
  }
}

Apr 10, 2024, 6:48 PM

Open Office Hours

In practice, you try to eliminate task barriers that require back and forth communication by setting dedicated block of time to meet. An office hour, reminiscent of your professor’s office hours, means you broadcast to your working network you are available in this block of time to chat about open loops.

The problem this solves is eliminating the number of unknowns in your work, whether that be client feedback, questions about a design contract, or ambiguous bug tickets. These tasks become open loops are require external help in order to uncover what tasks you have to do next. It also lowers the communication gap with your work network or team and bridge that gap of understanding. The end goal is it helps with end output and/or goals.

Championed by Cal Newport and highlighted in his book, Slow Productivity.
Apr 9, 2024, 6:08 PM

VSCode Fuzzy Search

In VSCode, open your palette, and type %, you get a fuzzy search across your files. And you can use navigational keybindings like cmd+up or cmd+down .

Fuzzy search screenshot
Apr 8, 2024, 6:47 PM
Context Archival

I periodically try to dump all of my mental contexts into my notes. I noticed this comes in a few different flavors.
- Safari Tabs on my iPhone and iPad: Goes into daily notes
- Random thoughts - go into drafts and get processed daily
- Shopping - including groceries, bills, and things I would like but not need. Those all go into a task manager
- Dangling tasks - gets reviewed in the task manager inbox weekly
- Personal thoughts - journaling every two weeks, although I want to do this more often
- Events I have not logged - go into my calendar.
- Downloads folder - weekly processed into other folders.
  
  Long-term storage in Dropbox and backup drive.
  
  Short-term in Inbox folder
- Photos - place special ones in folders. Select shots in favorites.
I am trying to think of other things that I purge. I used to write in a notepad and write on the page of everything I was thinking about. I used to write about people I have not spoken to in a long time that I should reach out to, mantras I came up with, or completely random thoughts.

Tiago Forte recommends putting all unused files into an Archive folder. This This activity helps remove our digital file mess and stops us from immediately organizing everything.
Apr 4, 2024, 10:09 PM
OODA Loop

Stands for Observe-Orient-Decide-Act (“OODA”) Loop. It’s an iteration because it feeds back into itself. Initially applied for military use, but has since been used for business decision-making and personal development.
Observe the situation and mentally note any key data points.

Orient by placing data in the context of existing knowledge and mental maps to create a picture of the current situation.

Make a decision on how to act in light of that situation.

Act and assess for any necessary adjustments.
Source: Sahil Bloom - The Curiosity Chronicle
Apr 4, 2024, 9:18 PM

RSS Feed Clean-up

I’m finally cleaning up my RSS feeds because it’s too untenable. In my Readwise Reader, my inflow is far greater with things I know I won’t read over things that I know I’ll read later. Hence trapping me in a cycle of scrolling over reading. I’m going to unsubscribe from a bunch of things.

Curation / The Stream

Students Have the Right to Protest Apartheid

TIL importmap

Start and end of day offsets for current system time zone offset using Luxon

The "Boring" Stack

Obsidian Templater - Updating Properties on Daily Notes

Elicit UX

Setting up SVGR with Jest

Open Office Hours

VSCode Fuzzy Search

Context Archival

OODA Loop

RSS Feed Clean-up