Today is Friday. I slept in today as part of my ongoing quest of getting more sleep. I also have therapy today. I'm grateful for my therapist. We have done some great work together. I am in a much better place than I was a year ago. I've been kinda in a rut lately and not sure what's up with that but I constantly tell myself “this too shall pass” and it seems to make a difference 🤷♂️
Today is Thursday. My first day off in a series of my weekly three days off. I only work 16 hours a week but my job is pretty exhausting. I work in behavioral health and work with clients with severe and persistent mental illness. Don't get me wrong, I love my job and it gives me great purpose, it's just very exhausting. I slept in till noon today which is fine since I didn't have anything planned. I'm a bit of an insomniac so getting much needed sleep is important.
Today is my Friday. I'm happy I only work a few days a week. I work in social work and it can get exhausting. I deal with my own pretty serious mental health issues so it compounds the experience. One of my dreams is that the mental health situation gets better in tech. One of the things I appreciate about Gen Z is that mental health seems like one of their priorities. I feel like Millennials talked about it but seeing as I'm now in my 40s I don't think we did enough.
I can feel the seasons shifting. It's getting closer to the holiday season again. This time of year brings me such mixed emotions. I don't really get along with my family so it's kinda difficult but I do appreciate the holiday vibe none the less. I'm not a fan of the cold but this summer I was really over the heat moreso than most years, so a more mild fall is actually pretty welcome.
I've spent a lot of time with markdown over the years. Usually in the form of blog articles or wiki entries. I often find myself reimplementing some sort of markdown to html system to render static files. I don't like writing. I'm not sure why. Lately I've been forcing myself to write something everyday in order to get into the habit. I'm not sure why I'm even pursuing this goal. Maybe I'm searching for some kinda spiritual insight into my own mind. Maybe I just get inadequate in my writing abilities.
Thinking a lot today about what matters to me in a social app. Lately, I've been alternating between mastodon and bluesky for my posts. More recently, I re-discovered write-freely as I'm working on writing more free-form articles.
I appreciate the complete isolation of each mastodon instance because if an admin goes rogue then it only affects the people on that instance and, while frustrating, there is an opportunity to switch servers.
Bluesky, on the other hand, while technically being federated, is actually quite centralized. There are a few things I do like, though. Firstly, is the identity system. I really like that it uses existing infrastructure for identity (DNS). I also like there is one unified interface. One of my concerns with mastodon is if there is a really-cool-feature that lands that requires a software update, you're dependent on your home server's admin to update the software to enable that feature for you. This isn't a big issue in practice, although I wonder if it's not a big issue specifically because they realize it's untenable and therefore nobody tries to rock the boat too much.
Recently, I tried creating my own federated protocol and realized it was kind of pointless because unless there is an existing userbase of the software there isn't much sense in federating the data. I've been debating creating a markdown type of editing thing but the software I'm already writing this on already does that and already has social protocols in place that are compatible.
One thing I like about writing prose vs writing code is that you don't need to have your writing “compile”. If the compiler in a program doesn't understand a single character your entire project fails. Whereas with natural language, even if someone only gleans a tiny insight, I would still consider that a “win”
Testing out write freely. I've been trying to encourage myself to write longer form posts as a self growth experiment. I'm giving myself grace and allowing them to be any length and quality with the goal of having consistency over time