If you really want to do something but find it difficult to bring yourself down to it, you don't need to find motivation. You need to unblock your motivation.

If you have too many things going on in the back of your mind, your motivation is blocked.

To unblock your motivation, resolve things from the past and clear the thoughts in your mind. ⋯

Normally you can avoid tracking files in Git by adding files to .gitignore.

But if files have been previously added for tracking, they will still be tracked even after appending them to .gitignore.

We need to first remove tracked files from cache. And add back all the files – including .gitignore – in the current directory. Now .gitignore will take effect.

I realized I read quite a lot on the web. I spend a lot of time browsing answers on StackOverflow and reading documentation.

For the most part, such information is only useful once and it's OK to forget it. But occasionally, I'd come across a new bug that reminds me of an older problem I had seen before. At that time, I'd wish I could remember how I solved that problem earlier.

I take notes in Obsidian when I try to seriously learn something new. In the meantime, I'd create flashcards in Anki if I find what I'm learning really useful. ⋯

A moment ago I got an error that reads like this:

I was really confused for a moment. Then I realized (() => void) | null means: Either a) a function that neither takes any argument nor returns any value; or b) null.

And () => void | null means a function that does not take any argument. And there are two possibilities when this function returns: Either it doesn't return anything or it returns a null. ⋯

Last week, my friend Joe asked me what's the best way to learn a programming language.

I replied: Go through the basics as quickly as possible. Then begin building things with it. This is how I learn Golang.

I had been curious about Rust for a while. And a coworker talked about how Rust was his favorite language with a lot of exuberance. I thought to myself, maybe I could do the same with Rust. ⋯

Description of bug: Using SourceTree on React project running on Node. When committing, linter fails to run with a complaint saying something like “node not found”.

Investigation: Googled a bit, the problem might have been caused by nvm`` or it's something aboutzsh`. Good people on StackOverflow also shared how they solved their similar bugs on their system.

But... Somehow I was using Volta to manage different versions of Node. Can't think of a good reason why I decided to do so. ⋯

I went through my finances using beancount. Double-entry bookkeeping seemed boring at first. But with the help of VSCode extensions for beancount that enable syntax highlighting and formatting, it became somewhat enjoyable.

I ran into problems over different currencies. I have a few transactions in USD and EUR. I wrote a Python script to convert bank statement formats to that of beancount.

Did you know you could use calc in Tailwind CSS? I was first mind-blown then felt it wrong. One should not choose to use the dark magic that is calc() unless it is her last option. Besides, by using Tailwind, we are telling ourselves now we are one step removed from the nuts and bolts of CSS. Using arbitrary numbers in brackets already feels “unidiomatic” in Tailwind. Last week when I found myself resorting to something like h-[calc(100%-20rem)] I grimaced very hard. ⋯

I bought YouTube Premium to skip ads. Now I play background music on the TV. It feels quite nice. And I found a channel called “Greenred Productions” very calming and helpful for concentration.

I moved to Gothenburg from Stockholm. And I like Gothenburg better.

Stockkholm feels like an archipelago of settlements connected by highways, subways and pendeltåg. In the middle of the city, we have touristy areas in Gamla Stan, commercial areas in Norrmalm and Södermalm. And really fancy areas in Östermalm. Beyond these quarters, the city feels more like non-contiguous dots of inhabited areas separated by woods. Some of these dots are bustling urban areas in their own right, such as Solna and other centers of communes in Greater Stockholm Area. But at the same time, a lot of them feel like villages.

Gothenburg as a city is held together more closely. The downtown area of Gothenburg is more walkable than that of Stockholm. I live in Hisingen and I love the lively messiness around here. ⋯

The idea of building a piece of software once and run it everywhere is certainly charming. And Go supports cross-compiling out of the box.

Fyne is a very promising GUI package for Go that helps you build a GUI app and cross-compile it for (almost) all devices and OSes.

For a quick example, this code gives you a small window with a label and an input field. Grab this piece of code, init a mod and tidy it, and you are good to go. ⋯