isaac.truett.info

Good Enough

2019-02-03T00:00:00+00:00

If at first you don't succeed

Back at the beginning of the year I posted on Google+ about my first attempt at soldering in a very long time. Since Google+ is going away, I figure I should start posting updates somewhere else.

This is what it looked like on the first try:

I'll probably re-post some of my Google+ take-out here later, but for now you can go read about the first attempt at the previous link.

Anyway, after some encouragement and advice from Kiki Jewell and Adam Liss, here is the same piece on my second attempt:

I still have trouble getting the pins heated to the point where solder will melt onto them. I end up melting some solder onto the tip of the iron and then dabbing a drop onto each pin. The result works, which is good enough for me, for now. Hopefully I will get time to practice on more electronics projects and my technique will improve.

Three Weeks In

2018-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

A Lighter Post

Wow, that last post was some heavy stuff. That'll happen now and then. I do have the occasional deep thought.

Monday marks the three-week anniversary of my first blog post and guide on this website. Let's get back to Guides and recap what I've written so far:

These posts all touch on the theme I started this website around: making web development more accessible to more people. Other topics, both heavy and light, will make an appearance as well.

In the spirit of lightness I'm posting a new guide, my first related to gaming on the Pixelbook: How to Run Dwarf Fortress on Chrome OS. Support for Android and Linux apps makes Chrome OS a strong contender for a gaming platform. However, as I talk about in the guide, the lack of GPU acceleration means the Linux games aren't quite there yet. It sounds like GPU support will be coming to Linux apps on Chrome OS, potentially before the end of the year. With your entire library of Android games from the Play Store at your fingertips, plus a growing supply of Linux games available on Steam and other sources, you can easily keep yourself entertained in between software launches.

The Living Room and The Dojo

2018-09-09T00:00:00+00:00

How we treat other people in public spaces needs work. Too often, people will thoughtlessly behave in a manner that causes others in a community to feel unsafe or unwelcome. This isn't necessarily a character flaw in the individual, but a failure to understand what is appropriate and inappropriate in a given space. We need a better model for understanding these interactions and making appropriate choices in the moment.

The Living Room

In your living room, alone or surrounded by your favorite friends and family, you probably feel pretty comfortable saying whatever you like. You can declare your political, religious, or musical preferences freely, and nobody will silence you. It's your living room, after all.

In your living room, you feel safe. You invite other people with whom you feel safe into your living room, and you talk amongst them in relaxed, intimate conversation.

In your living room, you aren't expecting to be reprimanded for saying something controversial, contentious, or divisive. You feel free to speak your mind, and you do so.

The Dojo

The Japanese word dojo (Kanji 道場) literally translates as a "place of the way." The term refers to space where meditation, martial arts, or other physical training are practiced.

In a dojo, you are respectful. You are attentive when someone else is speaking. You are thoughtful and deliberate; disciplined. You honor the place, the people around you, and the topic that brought you all together.

In a dojo, you feel safe. You trust that everyone there shares a common purpose: to practice, to share, and to learn together. Nobody is trying to hurt anybody else. If someone causes you pain, you let them know so that they can correct their technique for next time. If you hurt someone, they tell you and you correct your technique so it doesn't happen again. You quickly learn to interact in a way that is safe for everyone and mutually beneficial.

In a dojo, when you make a mistake you will be told. Whether it is the instructor, a nearby senior student, your partner, or another attentive observer, someone will point out what you did wrong, and offer guidance for how to do it better in the future. We all make mistakes during practice, and we improve by learning from those mistakes.

Community and Public Discourse

Jessica Otey introduced me to the living room as a metaphor for understanding speech in a conversation around community moderation. The idea that there are things that are okay to say in the privacy of your living room, but are not okay to say in a public setting immediately made sense, and my mind set to work searching: if the living room describes what a community is not, what describes what the community is? What's the converse community conversation convention? It's a dojo.

When you are part of a community, whether that is a local meetup, a neighborhood, or a national conference, you are not in your living room. You are in a dojo. You should treat others with the same respect, the same kindness and consideration, that you would give to your fellow students in the dojo. In doing so, you help to create an environment that benefits the entire community.

Thanksgiving

Just last month, David McRaney described in his YANSS podcast episode 133, How politics became our identity, the way norms have shifted around discussing politics at the dinner table:

Dinner parties used to be where you avoided politics. Now talking about politics at dinner parties is the norm.

Years ago, we avoided politics because we assumed the people at our table had diverse political identities, and we didn’t want to introduce a topic that might lead to an argument. Today, we assume our guests share a single identity, after all, why else would we have invited them?

Something has changed in the United States, and for many of us, it’s only at Thanksgiving dinner, a gathering where we don’t get to sort ourselves by political tribe, that we must face people who see the world differently than ourselves.

Similarly, a community like beCamp – an event I am honored to enjoy with the technology professionals of Charlottesville, VA every year – is not a place where I can assume that everyone shares my political views, just like those dinner parties of yesteryear that David talks about. Instead of behaving as if I'm in my living room, I, and all of the other attendees, should behave as if we are in a dojo, respectful of each other, open to ideas, and learning from our shared interest in technology.

Like martial arts, words can hurt if you use them improperly. We should tell each other when it hurts, and change how we do it. We don't want to hurt our fellow students, after all.

The Arena

Buddhism has the concept of near enemies, which I discovered in a blog post by Pamela Fox. Buddhist practicioners learn to cultivate a set of virtures and are warned about the dangers of the near enemies, things that are so close to those virtues that you could mistake them for virtues. The near enemies are dangerously different.

The dojo, the place of the way, where we value respect and practice and learning, has a near enemy: the arena. In the arena, we are not practicing; We are competing. We are not sharing; We are carefully guarding our secrets, planning and plotting against our opponent. We are not in the arena to learn. The arena is for tournaments. We are in the arena to win.

Winning is not the goal in the dojo, or in the community. Winning implies losing, and the purpose of the community is for everyone to benefit, not for some to benefit while others lose, or suffer, or feel unwelcome.

The Way

Our role as community organizers (or leaders in any organization) is to create dojos; places of the ways that we are trying to cultivate. As members of a community, we must honor the ways and care for the places.

Two is a Coincidence

2018-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

The Good Parts

Looking back at my git log, I see that the first five commits got me to my first blog post on the site. Seven commits later, I got around to writing about half of the first guide. Four commits later I finished the guide. In between, I'm fiddling with the site itself: styling, adding a little JavaScript, learning more about Jekyll, and so on. The technical bits. The fun stuff. But what I need to do is write more. Specifically, I started this whole thing to write Guides.

Fast forward several more commits (hah! it's a git joke) I finally buckled down and wrote a second guide. This one describes more of the fun stuff: adding go-script-bash to my project to make some of the little things easier.

My hope is still that as I get into the swing of things, I'll be able to do the little fun stuff and then turn around and publish a guide on it. I have a few larger guides in mind, too, and those will take some disciplined writing sessions to write out.

How I Made this Website

2018-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 1: A New Start

I started this website with the intention of documenting the process of creating this website. I will be writing Guides that detail how everything is done. I hope these guides, and the narrative blog posts that accompany them, will be helpful and informative to others.

Here, to start things off, are the notes I took while performing the initial setup of the website.

Ready, Set, Go!

I opened Google Keep, started a new note titled "How this Website Got Made" and started taking notes, like this one, about how I made this website
I created a project on GitHub

I opened git-bash and created a directory for my new website:

$ cd /c/dev/git
$ mkdir isaac.truett.info
$ cd isaac.truett.info/
$ git init
$ echo "# isaac.truett.info" >> README.md
$ git add README.md
$ git commit -m "Hello, world."
$ git remote add origin git@github.com:itruett/isaac.truett.info.git
$ git push origin master

I went to the project settings for my GitHub project and enabled GitHub Pages.
I registered a domain with Google Domains
I added my new domain name as a custom domain in the GitHub Pages settings
I created an A record for my domain pointing to 185.199.108.153
I created a CNAME record for a subdomain pointing to itruett.github.io

I created a CNAME file for my repository:

$ echo "isaac.truett.info" >> CNAME
$ git add CNAME
$ git commit -m "Added CNAME file."
$ git push origin master

In Summary

I was able to create a website live on the internet in a few steps, and the only thing I paid for, the domain name, is optional. I could have stopped with the default GitHub Pages URL, itruett.github.io/isaac.truett.info. I could have selected a shorter project name for a better URL, or used GitHub Pages for my account instead of a project, but I wanted to spend the $12 to register a domain. It was a small price, and made for a useful commitment device. I also had a Windows 10 laptop and an internet connection, already paid for. You could do the same thing from a library computer, or any other internet connected computer you have access to.

I will publish a guide for How To Create a Website on GitHub Pages with a more detailed look at the process.

It's also worth a moment to take note of what this is not:

This is not the only way to make a website. It's a set of tools that I decided to use this time, mostly driven by cost and convenience.
This is not a professional-quality website. Don't expect to make a fortune following these 9 steps.
This is not pretty. This website has no style (yet). In fact, the only reason it has content at all is that GitHub Pages decided to show the contents of the README.md file by default.
This does not perform any server-side processing. Everything is pre-compiled by GitHub and served up as static pages. I'll set up a more robust server later.