Simplifying and reducing clutter in my life and work

post, Oct 14, 2019, on Mitja Felicijan's blog

I recently moved my main working machine back from Hachintosh to Linux. Well the experiment was interesting and I have done some great work on macOS but it was time to move back.

I actually really missed Linux. The simplicity of apt-get or just the amount of software that exists for Linux should be a no-brainer. I spent most of my time on macOS finding solutions to make things work. Using Brew was just a horrible experience and far from package managers of Linux. At least they managed to get that sudo debacle sorted.

Not all was bad. macOS in general was a perfectly good environment. Things like Docker and tooling like this worked without any hiccups. My normal tools like coding IDE worked flawlessly and the whole look and feel is just superb. I have been using MacBook Air for couple of years so I was used to the system but never as a daily driver.

One of the things I did after I installed Linux back on my machine was cleaning up my Dropbox folder. I have everything on Dropbox. Even projects folder. I write code for living so my whole life revolves around couple of megs of code (with assets). So it's not like I have huge files on my machine. I don't have movies or music or pictures on my PC. All of that stuff is in cloud. I use Google music and I have Netflix account which is more than enough for me.

I also went and deleted some of the repositories on my Github account. I have deleted more code than deployed. People find this strange but for me deleting something feels so cathartic and also forces me to write better code next time around when I am faced with similar problem. That was a huge relief if I am being totally honest.

Next step was to do something with my webpage. I have been using some scripts I wrote a while ago to generate static pages from markdown source posts. I kept on adding and adding stuff on top of it and it became a source of a frustration. And this is just a simple blog and I was using gulp and npm. Anyways after couple of hours of searching and testing static generators I found an interesting one https://github.com/piranha/gostatic and I just decided to use this one. It was the only one that had a simple templating engine, not that I really need one. But others had this convoluted way of trying to solve everything and at the end just required quite bigger learning curve I was ready to go with. So I deleted couple of old posts, simplified HTML, trashed most of the CSS and went with https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ aesthetics. Yeah, the previous site was more visually stimulating but all I really care is the content at this point. And Times New Roman font is kind of awesome.

I stopped working on most of the projects in the past couple of months because the overhead was just too insane. There comes a point when you stretch yourself too much and then you stop progressing and with that comes dissatisfaction.

So that's about it. Moving forward minimal style.



Other posts