• 4 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Long time i3 user, recently switched to Hyprland+Wayland. I just don’t like mice, don’t enjoy using them, and I find the snappiness and responsiveness of keyboard-centric workflows very fun and enjoyable.

    I am a software developer, and I am very impatient when it comes to my tools: I like my feedback cycles and interactions to be as tight as possible. This limited study from 2015 showed that developers, on average, spend ~26% of their productive time on stuff that is not related to either code editing or comprehension, including 14% spent on UI interactions. Tiling window manager allows me to streamline most of these interactions through hotkey bindings and shell automation, >!so I prefer spending literal months polishing my dotfiles instead!<










  • I have for a bit, decided to stick to MD because of its accessibility to my non-tech collaborators, it is easier for them to install Obsidian, and MD is very well-known.

    Aside from that, I am planning to use Pandoc to process my sources into other deliverables: web pages, PDFs etc. I am myself still learning this ecosystem, and markdown (in my experience) just enjoys more visibility.

    Truth be told, I did not have any exposure to Org Mode prior to looking it up for knowledge management, so all of the above might be my “little duck” brain speaking.


  • Bevy, specifically because it is an ecosystem of libraries. I tried UE3/4, Unity and Godot, and I’ve always found the complexity of tooling and amounts of options available completely overwhelming. Not to mention, that most of these tools and options funnel the developer into very specific and opinionated ways of doing things.

    By contrast, Bevy is just a Rust crate, and it is modular - I can connect only those plugins and functions I really need. If I am ever confused by some function, or a type, I just press “gd” and my nvim will show the definition of this function or type - it feels refreshingly simple and seamless in comparison with the enormity and complexity of Unreal or Unity. At any point in time I am staring at my code, I only see things that are relevant to the problem, and nothing else.

    I can bring my own tooling (editors, analysis tools, asset pipelines etc.), projects are easy to build and automate, - it is pure bliss.

    The absence of an editor allows me to hook up whatever I want: LDTK, Trenchbroom, even Unity could be used as a scene editor. There is virtually no vendor lock-in with dependencies either. Don’t like Rapier as your physics engine - easy-peasy, you can use Avian, or something else, or something custom, or nothing at all. Don’t like Bevy UI - no worries, there is Egui, multiple integrations with other UI frameworks, you can even use Typst layouts for your menus if you so desire.

    Right now I am working on a literate game with a friend: our sources are markdown files with bits of code in them. Our automation compiles markdown to Rust sources and then builds the game, potentially along with the devlogs and some other auxiliary artifacts.

    My non-technical partner contributes to the repo freely, treating it as an Obsidian vault, - in our team there is no distinction between technical writing and development, our game design document and source code are literally the same thing. This approach has removed loads of roadblocks and allows us to safely and controllably accumulate knowledge, before distilling it into a working game.

    It wasn’t trivial to set up, but it wasn’t overly complicated either - good luck replicating this set up with Unity or Unreal though.




  • If you work a lot with plain-text files (markdowns, office documents CSV etc.) try learning Git. It is a version control tool - it keeps timestamped versions of your documents, so if you edit something wrong, or delete a wrong file you can bring it back by “checking out” a previous version.

    It’s a software development tool originally, so learning it might be daunting for a lot of folks - fear not, download a graphical Git client app and look up some tutorials.

    I promise once you get the hang of it, it will be hard to imagine doing anything without it.

    One of those tools I wish were more popular among people who are not into software/engineering.




  • I grew up in a family of medical doctors, it came with its own set of similar challenges. Every problem discussion always revolved exclusively around solutions or practical harm reduction. I suspect God forbade the doctors from talking just for emotional support.

    Every problem I ever had (completely normal ones included) was medicalized and pathologized, neatly classified and wrapped in a set of actionable instructions: “this is how you get better, this is how you allow it to get worse”.

    I still remember coming home from school and sitting down at the dining table, eating my sausages with buckweed, while my dad, mom and older sister discuss methods and techniques to install a urethral catheter in a person with a broken phallus.

    It wasn’t good or bad, it was just weird I guess. Hey, at least I am not scared of blood/trauma/desease, and in a some cases I believe it allowed me to stomach helping people in need, when other people would turn away out of disgust or disturbance.