Now

I've started using a Thinkpad

I got an old Thinkpad just the other day. I've stared using this outside of work as my primary laptop for writing.

It serves a few things.

It forces me to be a pure Medley customer. Whenever I ended up finding bugs while I'm using Medley, I end up getting distracted from writing and just jump into a programming to fix the issue. With using a very cheap and slow device, I'm basically kneecapped from doing any development work.

I'll file the bug, continue writing, and I'll fix it tomorrow.

I become the customer with the slowest device. Medley is fast. But using an 8th-gen chip really highlights some of the rendering "issues" that's in the code. I put it in quotes 'cause it's a fraction of a fraction of a second.

But I do notice it.

This actually helped me do research by looking at rendering performance of JS heavy apps like Linear, Notion, etc.

---

So far, I'm really liking this Lenovo Thinkpad X390. The keyboard is nice. Arch almost ran perfectly out of the box. The only thing that I need to set up is bluetooth.

My only annoyance with this device is the display. The viewing angles are horrendous. You really need to be looking at it at the correct angle for it to look nice.

Weird reviewing a 7-year old device.

Forcing myself to learn docker

I wanted to be a lot more proficient with Docker. I know enough to use it and to get it working to a usable state, but I've never gone in the weeds of it on a more ops-sense.

Just for the heck of it, I set up a Beelink EQR6 to replace my old M1 Pro MBP as a home server and just went ham on the services I've added.

From managing the network with Pihole, setting up CI runners with Gitea, setting up fun automation with Home Assistant, I really went through the ups and downs with the painful management of Docker and permission issues. Even set up SSL with Caddy with an actual domain that I bought.

It's a bit overkill, of course, but I did learn a lot in just a few days!

The worst of it all was Plex.

I spent half the day setting it up thinking I was having massive permissions issues, hence Plex always had a weird landing error page that I can bypass.

Turns out, my docker setup was fine. Plexs' latest Docker release at the time was broken.

Fun stuff.

Writing proper commits.. and learning to rebase

I've never been a fan of git for tracking history.

I've never really understood the idea of it.

I've vacillate between writing commits and spamming wip and squashing. (yeah, yeah, that's a rebase)

I've always believed the project was the source of truth. And commits that are weaving are more trouble than it's worth if you don't have a proper rollback strategy anyway. Plus, who the fuck reads commits anyway?

But, I want to give it a good try and see if I change my mind.

I've started using Conventional Commits. `fix(scope)!: message`. And I gotta say, I love it. I'm still not backreading the commits aside from when I write changelogs but it's nice to have an overview of features, perf, fixes and which scopes were affected.

As for rebase, I'm learning a bit. I've been using it for amends and correcting past typos, but nothing that's giving me that aha! moment yet.

It could be because I'm mostly working solo on projects? But I'll keep at it.