Back At It Again - OCC Day 3/4

Alpine Linux & an Acer ZG5 · July 10th, 2023

The first official day of the challenge! I probably should have dated my first three days as "day zero" and I kind of spent random time the entire month before preparing my system. So in a sense I've had entire month zero to get to this point. It's a bit silly, but I've found that it's immensely helpful. Instead of spending the opening day of the challenge installing a new OS, trying to remember what programs I use, what I want any and all of that to look/feel like. It's way too much to unpack in just a few hours at the end of a Monday.

Instead I've spent the last couple of days researching various topics for my zettelkasten and enjoying my system. Despite the limitations imposed by the hardware and the challenge I've been readily able to run weechat and chat with everyone participating, compile APKBUILDS for various bits of missing software, and work in Emacs to extend my org-roam/agenda setup and write these blog posts.

Most of my curiosity lately has been surrounding organization and planning methodologies. Last night was spent almost entirely researching various software development methods, waterfall, agile, scrum and all that jazz. I'm fortunate enough to work for a small enough company (and outside of a dedicated software development role) that none of these methods are foisted upon me. I've heard absolute venom spit at the likes of agile and scrum though, so I probably need to at least appreciate the rough overview of the methods. And it turns out that there's a neat org extension called org-scrum that can integrate directly into my org-roam capture templates so I could define my development projects and look at fancy burn down charts for my team of one! Yeah that sounds silly when I write it out, but I'm going to do it anyways just because.

See it'd be really neat to work through a bigger project, like writing a TUI podcast listening application, and treat it as though it's a professional project. On one hand, I really want to do this because I can't find a TUI podcatcher I like, and on the other hand if I go through all of that effort to write one I'd like to make it useful enough for other people to use. But all of that has to be realistically bounded by the amount of time I have to invest in something, and the creation of a working prototype. Also, breaking down the various functions into discrete parts rather than one massive monolithic file that nobody will ever even want to maintain, including me.

Outside of that, I started reading Time Management for System Administrators. I don't usually read these sort of self help books because I just don't find them particularly engaging, but this one seems relatable. The author is pretty witty, and points to several very relatable issues that Sysadmins generally experience. Mostly I'm reading it as a way to validate some conclusions I've come to as I rework my personal organization methods.

And now that is something I could spend some serious time talking about! I've been spending lots of time over the past couple of months sharpening the ax so to speak, and completely reworked my org-agenda setup. Adopted org-roam and actually started to migrate my personal knowledge base into org-roam. And now with this org-scrum idea I think I might have a solid solution for managing my work, life, hobbies, and foss contributions. Once I've finished tinkering with org-scrum I'll make a post on it all.

But that's it for the last couple of days, learning in a distraction free environment, and juggling projects while I rejigger the way I conceptualize said projects!