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Why I wished I knew more about the inner workings of computers For the last three years, I have gotten increasingly interested in how computers actually work. Sure, this comes years to late (from my current standpoint) but in the past I was perfectly happy to play games and cheat my way through them (the first of which was Age of Empires with little photon laser shooting soldiers.) But nowadays, I want to KNOW how stuff works. More often than not it’s something like “Hey, how could I keep my monitors from going to sleep?” and after 10 minutes I’m down a rabbithole on Linux messageboards, sifting through information on systemd and symlinked services and whatnot. And while that is super interesting - it is also beyond me. ...

Can you relate with this weird state of mind, where you fixate on an idea and stress yourself out over nothing in particular? No deadlines, just your own drive? I’m guessing, everyone had that at some point in their lives. For a week at the end of October I almost did nothing else on the computer other than WordPress. Sure, I checked mails and such, but I didn’t do any exercises, tutorials, I didn’t code on a website project - I only went to the WordPress site of an NGO I am part of, and fired up the staging website. ...

Moving house is not very fun - it’s exhausting and stressful, especially when you’re like me and forget where you set down a tool immediately after setting it down, and then spending and eternity looking for it in all the wrong places while slowly getting angrier. Moving is also a lot more stressful for your cat (if you have one) - I got away with some deep scratches, he got a nice trauma. (But he got accustomed to the new place very quickly and struts about as if he were the owner of the building.) ...

“Fun” seems to be THE thing when it comes to coding for me. Because it makes me happy, because it is fun, and so on, recursive logic yay. Right next to “Fun”, or somewhere close AND diametrically opposed is “Frustrating”, which learning new things can and will absolutely always be. In the last day (and night) and day I had the absolute pleasure to delve a bit deeper into the Odin Project foundations and play around with Flexbox. I had worked with it before, when I coded along “Head First HTML & CSS”, and did not at all know what I was doing. (As and aside: I learned some super rudimentary stuff at that time and set up a webpage on the local LAMP server, which centered around my cat. And I wanted to make it look neat, and what do you know - five minutes later I am deep into the rabbit hole on something about a Grid or a Flexbox, which at that time thought that was some kind of hack.) ...