Irregular Reveries 16: Bear, Automator, and Ruby
After a break from building side projects, I've found a new one, and I'm obsessed with it.
Instead of spending countless hours perfecting the UI and not shipping, I decided to build a useful prototype in the shortest time possible. That resulted in having an ugly but helpful product after just a couple of days. Now I can iterate on my design more informed by the experience of using it every day.
This week's article
I've spent too much time playing around with Bear, and I've found a workaround for creating templates for it. I love using Ruby for small scripts like this. It really shines for that, as it has fantastic support for dealing with dates.
Content candy
I loved this article on why we need more, not less, creators online.
"It takes almost no courage to denounce something you disagree with or post your hatred of something online. This is the trap of our modern times. It is the feeling of action and participation without action. This makes me sad because all I see is the latent energy of curious and creative people who don't have an outlet. We want to matter. Social media gives us the cheap version of mattering - one that doesn't last."
It has reminded me of an essay from Paul Graham and this sentence: "The most important sort of disobedience is to write essays at all."
Something to think about
"More generally, you must continually try to strike the right balance between order and chaos as you interact with your environment. If you let the chaos subsume you, then you will not make progress in any particular direction. But if you are too ordered, then you will not be able to adapt to changing circumstances and will not have enough luck surface area to improve your chances of success." — Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models
Question for you
Are you a specialist or a generalist?
If you are a specialist, how do you avoid having a narrow view of the world? If you are a generalist, how do you avoid being "the jack of all trades, but a master of none"?