Category Archives: Code

2023 Reading List with Lots of Neil Gaiman, Do Books, and Colson Whitehead

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2023 was my best year reading to date.

It was the first year I started reading books by Neil Gaiman, seven books, five Do Books, and three by Colson Whitehead, making them the top two authors and group of books.

My Yearly Plan

Each year, the plan is to read a book a week, and this year will be the closest I get to that goal. This year, I’m close to finishing reading a book every eight or nine days on average, even though because I read a few at a time, I finish them a day or so apart.

Typically, from mid-November/Thanksgiving until the end of the year, I attempt to finish up many books I still need to finish, along with some of the shorter/more straightforward/easier-to-read books.

NOTE – I typically read a handful of books at once.

Reading more than a book at a time allows me to switch around depending on my mood. If I need some light reading or have time to read through something a bit denser that needs more attention, I can.

My List of Books for 2023

I broke my list of books into categories in the order I read them.

  • I try. I Fail. I learn. – Hiut Denim (Do Lectures)
  • Delicious Beans from Rancho Gordo – Every Pot a Victory – A Guide to Happy Beans Every Day – Rancho Gordo
  • Arbitrary Stupid Goal – Tamara Shopsin
  • Cooked – A Natural History of Transformation – Michell Pollan
  • Shop Class as SoulCraft – Matthew B. Crawford
  • Lark Ascending – A Novel – Silas House
  • Dave Grohl – The Storyteller – Taste of Life and Music – Dave Grohl
  • Four Thousand Weeks – Time Management for Mortals – Oliver Burkman
  • The War of Art – Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles – Steven Pressfield
  • Rebel without a Crew – Or How a 23-year-old Filmmaker with $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player – Robert Rodriguez
  • No. 4 – On the Writing Process – John McPhee
  • I Will Teach You to Be Rich – No Guilt. No Excuses. No BS. Just a 6-Week Program That Works (2nd Edition) – Ramit Sethi
  • Salt Fat Acid Heat – Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking – Samin Nosrat and Art by Wendy MacNaughton
  • Eat That Frog! – Get More of the Important Things Done Today – Brain Tracy
  • Scrap Steading – Prosperous Homesteading on Any Budget – Billy Bond and Matt Hundley
  • The One Thing – The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results – Gary Keller with Jay Papasan
  • Toby Dog of Gold Shaw Farm – Morgan Gold
  • Animal, Vegetable, Miracle – A Year of Food Life – Barabra Kingsolver with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver
  • In the Blink of an Eye – A Perspective on Film Editing – 2nd Edition – Walter Murch
  • The Man Who Made Things Out of Trees – The Ash in Human culture and History – Robert Penn
  • Man’s Search for Meaning – Revised and Updated – Viktor E. Frankl (Reread)

Books by Neil Gaiman

  • Coraline
  • Good Omens – The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter. Witch – Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
  • The Graveyard Book
  • The Ocean at the End of the Lane
  • American Gods – A Novel
  • Neverwhere – A Novel
  • Stardust – A Novel

Do Books

  • Do Earth – Healing Strategies for Humankind – Tamsin Omond
  • Do Make – The Power of You Own Two Hands. – James Otter (Re-read)
  • The Book of Do – A manual for living
  • Do Interesting – Notice. Collect. Share. – Russell Davies
  • Do Sourdough – Slow bread for busy lives. – Andrew Whitley

Books by Colson Whitehead

  • The Nickel Boys – A Novel
  • Harlem Shuffle
  • Crook Manifesto – A Novel

Homesteading/Farming Book Club

  • The Living Soil Handbook – The No Till Grower’s Guide to Ecological Market Gardening – Jesse Frost
  • The Art of Fermentation – An In-depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World – Sandor Ellix Katz

Apartment Building Book Club

  • The Maid – A Novel – Nita Prose
  • Perfume – The Story of a Murder – Patrick Suskind

Remote JavaScript Book Club

  • Cracking the Coding Interview – 189 Programming Questions and Solutions – Gayle Laakmann McDowell (The group did not finish it.)

Total Books Read

I finished the year strong and managed to read 41 books.

I’m Learning More Through YouTube

I continued watching more YouTube to learn about cooking, shooting videos, storytelling, starting a YouTube channel, starting a small farm, etc., and taking a few courses I purchased about editing with DaVinci Resolve.

Less Reading in 2024

Here’s to less reading in 2024 than in 2023.

In 2024, I plan to spend more time learning how to shoot, edit, and add special effects/graphics to videos to start my YouTube channel.

Please comment if you have read any of these books, what you thought of them, and if you have any suggestions.

Blogged Daily in January

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In mid-December, I thought it would be interesting to see if I could write a blog post every day in January.

After looking at my blog, I noticed it had been almost two years since I last posted (late January 2019). Before that, I wrote one post in July 2018 and nothing in 2017.

Posting Daily

Posting every day allowed me to write a bunch at first about things from 2020 and the pandemic. Along with some things I wanted to say and others that came up.

Part of the issue was I tended to write longer posts with example code. Which needed to be coded semantically and accessibly, of course. So it took a long time to write them and then post them if I ever did. So I stopped for the most part.

Shorter Blog Posts

So I decided the posts would be short. In my mind, that meant 500 to 1,000 words. It seems most of the blog posts in January 2021 ended up being between 300 and 600 words on average.

The longest post was the first one on January 1st at 926 words. The shortest one was 197 words about a week ago.

What Were the Numbers

I went back and wrote down the number of words for each post in January. The total words I wrote were 14,789 for an average of 477 and some change per day.

NOTE – I only had to add all the words per day up three times to get totals to match twice.

It’s Tough Blogging Daily

After writing a post every day for a month now, I’m not sure how Austin Kleon and others find the time to post daily. Or have ideas most days. Occasion they skip a day or so. Either way, I have found it to be hard to do every day. It’s a lot of work to do it more than a few times a week.

Posting Weekly

After posting every day for a month, I found it took about an hour to two hours daily for each post. Some days three hours if I was working on more than one psst.

Meaning I would come up with an idea or two, outline them, maybe even write the first draft. Or the next day, finish the post and edit it. Then post it or if I was writing on the weekends or had the time started one for a few days in advance.

I think spending four or five hours a week writing a post or two would be good.

Doing so would give me eight or ten hours back. That I had been using to write, edit, and post for other things like time to read and learn to improve my skills. Say in JavaScript, CSS Grid, etc. Or maybe cooking, coding, relaxing, etc.

Or even spending time thinking about what I want to be when I group.

How I’m Using GitHub

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I have had a GitHub account since March 6, 2013, but I never used it until much later in 2016.

I started working on a list of places to eat when I traveled and using GitHub to backup/store my code.

First GitHub Use

My first use of GitHub was on September 30, 2016, when I created my first repro for the place to eat project. At some point, I purchased the domain name GottaEatHere.com to put the information on. I bought a bunch more domains because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to call the application.

Reason for Using GitHub

The reason I started the project was for the An Event Apart and Microsoft 10K Apart contest. Besides, people had been asking me for recommendations of where to eat. So I figured I build a small web-based application to kills two birds with one stone. The contest was where people had to build an application in less than 10 kilobytes (KB) of code.

I spent some time upfront figuring out how best to do that. I wanted to learn PHP or at least get better at it, so that’s where I started.

Planning the Application

My first thoughts were I would need two or three Kb for CSS. Then another three Kb for my HTML template, and the remaining Kb for logic to render the pages content.

I decided to use JSON files because I wasn’t sure if a database would count against the total of 10 Kb. Which allowed me to learn something else new too.

I worked to get my PHP application to render a list of five or six cities, and I think five restaurants I loved going to. Each city had its know JSON file, and they were half Kb in size or something like that.

The 10 Kb or less version of the application had a lot less information per city and restaurant. I think it had a name, address, phone number, URL, and a short description. Now it has a bunch o other information.

A person chooses a city was from a drop-down list. Then the PHP would read the JSON file for the city that a person picked. Then render the restaurants for that city. Nothing fancy, but it got the job done. I didn’t expect to win anything, and I didn’t.

Of course, the whole time, I was making sure it was as accessible as possible.

Using GitHub Daily

On November 18, 2016, I started making more commits to add more places to eat along with more cities, along with information.

November 18th was the day I started making at least one commit or added an issue to GitHub every day. It might have been for new fields, cities, states, etc., to GitHub every day.

Over the last four and a half or so years, I have only missed doing something on GitHub about a dozen times. So that works out to three or four times a year. I’m okay with that and don’t lose sleep over it if I do. Some of the updates and issues were related to my slides, and others were for code examples for the slides.

My use of GitHub is still through their desktop application. It lets me create new repro’s, create issues for new features, cites, restaurants, etc.

With only me working on the projects, I have not had to worry about creating branches, merging others’ code, etc. At some point, I need to learn how to do that through the application or the command line.

Need to Learn More Git

So here’s to learning more Git. Be it through the GitHub application or, more importantly, through the command line.

Enjoying the Extra Writing

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Since I started blogging again this year, I have noticed I’m enjoying the writing part. Keeping a daily schedule has been good and bad.

My Process

I have spent time first coming up with blog post ideas and then outlining them. Once I have done an outline or two, I start putting in a bit of the content as the first draft. Then on my walk’s I tend to work through ideas and figure out what I want to say. It’s been helpful getting the thoughts down in my head before typing them in blog posts.

Keeping the posts between a couple of hundred words and maybe 500 or 600 words has been helpful. My old style was to write long posts of a thousand to fifteen hundred words with code examples, etc. Doing these took many hours, a few days, or even weeks.

I still need to finish a few of the longer blog posts I started a year or more ago and get them out at some point. But right now, I’m working on writing every day and putting something new out.

Posting Every Day so Far this Year

It’s been interesting attempting to make sure to post everyday. The issue is more what else do I have or need to say at a given time.

Posting every day so far in January, it’s been nice to talk about what was happening on a given day. Or to recap what happened on a given day. Like the weekend lazy Saturday post a while ago or on Thursdays about Wednesday’s Inauguration.

So here’s to seeing how long I can keep writing/posting every day.

Might Slow Up on Posts

I’m not sure if I want to keep it up because of the time it has been taking. I think I could use the time to learn more modern CSS and JavaScript to help look for a front-end coding job.

Between outlining posts, thinking what I want to say, and writing the first draft of posts. Then coming back to posts to edit/finish them and then one last check before posting takes time. Even these shorter style posts are taking anywhere from an hour to three hours.

Or it might be a mix of code learning and blog posts, with some of them being about what I have learned.

Other Activities

I also need to keep time for my 100 Day Project wine bottle shape drawings or adding restaurants to Gotta Eat Here. Doing so helps for when it’s safe to travel. I want to have plenty of places to eat when I’m away.

I want to add some features like a map of all the places for a given location on a separate page. Doing it this way as not to slow up the downloading of the main list of restaurants. The maps feature needs more research for the best way to add them without cost to me.

I would like to make the website a progressive web application, too, at some point.

Doing All the Things

So here’s to making time to both write, learn to code, etc., while still getting time to relax too.

100 Day Project

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Back on April 6th, 2015, I started the 100 Day Project to do 100 days of something creative. Some people wrote for 100 days, while others drew or made mini-movies, sang, coded, etc.

Preparing to Paint

I decided it had been probably eight or ten years since I painted, so I thought I would do that. I checked on my paints, and even though they were old, they were in great shape to use.

A week or two before, I went to get a few new brushes and some small canvas boards to paint on. I ended up getting the following size boards: 4 x 6, 5 x 7, 8 x 10, and even a few 10 x 12. All those are in inches not feet.

Started Painting

On the evening of the 6th of April, I started using my new boards and brushes to paint wine bottle shapes on a colored background. It was rough going at first, but I kept at it.

As my skills improved, I used my pallet knives to paint either the bottle or the background. Doing so allowed me to learn again how to use them. At some point, I even did both bottles and background with the pallet knife.

Switched to Digital Drawing

I kept this up for about 180 days or so before going to New York City for a long weekend. So I wasn’t going to bring my paints, etc. to paint while in New York. I was concerned about how to bring wet paintings home in the train. So I carried my iPad and learned how to do a digital drawing using Paper by 53.

At first, I did my drawing with my fingers. The drawings weren’t that good and probably wouldn’t have been much better using a digital pencil either.

Then when Paper by 53 came out with their pencil, I bought one. Purchasing the pencil gave me more features/tools in the application and improved my wine bottle shape drawings.

At some point, I missed a day or so along the way.

I’m currently at drawing/painting 2,107 out of I think it’s like 2,117 or so days.

So not bad being creative each day minus ten or so days over almost five years. Some of it could be a bit of miss numbering, but I think it’s more. I missed a few days.

So I have missed on average two days a year. Not bad in my book.

Application Upgrade

At one point, the application wanted people to pay a monthly fee after upgrading to the newest version. So I held off for many, many months.

At some point during the summer of 2020, I mistakenly upgraded after such a long time. Because it had been so long since the improvements, I lost 1,700 – 1,800 digital drawings.

I think they are still on my iPad somewhere, but I haven’t been able to find them, and I never downloaded them. Which I had thought to do many a time but didn’t.

It was a momentary feeling of loss, but I figured what was I going to do at that point. Okay, there might have been a few swear words mumbled under my breath. Only because it was late at night, and I didn’t want to wake up the upstairs neighbors.

Other Daily Creative Projects

I have done a similar thing with GitHub for a project to keep track of places to eat when I travel (Gotta Eat Here).

Then I started another drawing thing with a friend’s child. After they saw me doing my drawing each day, I was visiting them and showed interest in doing the same thing.

I will write more on those in future posts.

Here’s to More Creativity

So here is to doing something creative each day to break up work, life, and the pandemic. While not making it into something that makes you feel bad/stressed if you miss a day.

It’s supposed to be fun and not stressful.