🗒️ March 2024 Updates

Play is our brain’s favorite way of learning.

— Diane Ackerman

Happy Springtime everyone!

Yearly Theme

For the past few years, I’ve been trying something new instead of New Year’s resolutions: a yearly theme.

But first, what is a “yearly theme”? Instead of setting resolutions at the start of the year, you set an overall idea of how you would like to approach each year or season. This then becomes a guide for your personal and/or professional life throughout that period.

Ideally, you would also think of what the ideal outcome is for a set period and some key actions you would like to complete. This helps you maintain focus throughout the year when considering new projects.

My yearly theme for 2024 is “Year of Renewal”. As I mentioned in the last newsletter, I was under a lot of stress last year, and I thought I would take a step back and gather myself again.

In practice, this looks like a goal a month, focusing on a different part of renewal. January was defining boundaries. I answered the following questions:

• What do I have to accept?
• What do I leave behind?
• What do I adopt?

This helped me determine how to bring in the new year by making these identifications.

In February, I wanted to renew my sense of play. As I’ll go over in my highlights, I’ve been playing with code again. ChatGPT and other LLMs have renewed my interest in bespoke applications, i.e. one-off applications that serve a singular purpose. It’s renewed my sense of what I like to work on, even if it’s a selfish purpose to fulfill my curiosities.

I’ll go over March’s goal in the next newsletter, as I’m still in the middle of it.

Craft By Zen Highlights

Now that I have a routine of adding content to my website, here’s a recap of what I did in March.

• Weekly Notes - Weekly notes continue! I’ve been using that as a scratch pad collecting what I’ve discovered over the past week. I’ve wanted a reflection process that slows down the hose of information presented to us daily. There’s too much endless scrolling, and by forcing myself to review what it is I’m looking at. And also, at a second glance, I realize what’s important and not important to share.
  • Case in point, here’s an article about a couple who reconnected 77 years later.
• Recruiters - as recruiters reach out to me, I’ve been adding their job postings to my classifieds.
• Curations - I haven’t been as active in adding more curations. I have plans on adding a micro-blog at some point that will distinguish longer posts and a free-form stream of thought. I love the examples like The stream and The Verge authors.
• Projects / Experiments - I was messing around with ChatGPT to create a Guitar Fingering tool to help me quickly look up a chord. I wasn’t satisfied with what I found online, so I aided ChatGPT to build on it, although, at the end of the day, I took what it outputted as a template and finished it myself.
  • Another experiment was building a Chrome extension to quickly add links to my Obsidian vault.
  • Lastly, I was putting together some small scripts to help me parse through my Google Contacts export and add them to my Obsidian vault as a personal CRM. I will have an article to follow up with how I use the personal CRM soon.

Thanks for all of the support from everyone! If you like these updates, you can always reply to these emails and let me know what’s going on in your life.

That’s all for now!

Ciao