Weekly Review #40 - Open Source Summer, Beyond Code and Vanishing Sleep

'Here After Us - Mayday'

Preface

This piece is a record and reflection of my life from 2023-05-21 to 2023-05-29.

It wasn’t until the weekend that I realized I hadn’t gone downstairs at all this week, which seems to have become the norm in my life. However, my efficiency was decent. At work, I researched and learned about some new things, and continued to read documents related to chains and contracts. Out of interest, I also briefly looked at Swift and SwiftUI tutorials. As a deep user of the Apple ecosystem, I’ve always been interested in these underlying technologies, although I rarely use them at work. It was a good opportunity to learn about them. On the weekend, thinking I couldn’t be so introverted anymore, I attended the “Open Source Summer” offline event that I had previously signed up for. It was quite fun. There were many other interesting things as well.

Beyond Code

Open Source Summer

open_source_activities

I’m not actually someone who’s particularly keen on attending offline events. I often just stay in my own world. After returning to Hangzhou in March and April, I wanted to take a step out, so I frequently attended the Web3 Festival in Hong Kong and various surrounding offline events. But I actually found that I’m not so enthusiastic about meeting many new people or maintaining continuous enthusiasm for an energy-consuming activity, so I haven’t paid much attention to or participated in such events since coming back.

This time, I saw STRRL post about it on Twitter, and I also learned that Zhizi and Bread were going to give speeches. I found it quite interesting, and it wasn’t far, so I went. I arrived quite early and got a lot of fun peripherals. I feel like I won’t be short of stickers when I change my computer next time.

Later, I heard many open source experts share their experiences, and had some small exchanges with some of them. I felt that curiosity and love for tinkering are quite common traits. When encountering something interesting or some real-world problems, we always trace back to the source. Even if we find it’s not our problem, we don’t stop there, but continue to explore upstream, whether it’s an Issue or a PR.

Recently, I’ve actually been caught in a kind of self-consuming anxiety. My work is actually much more interesting than before, and I have some of my own time to learn things I’m interested in. But perhaps because there are too many things I want to do, and my self-discipline and execution often can’t be as stable as expected, I’ve been feeling a bit stuck. However, after participating in this event, I’ve improved quite a bit. I feel that whether it’s open source or this field, there are still many interesting things to do, and no matter what stage you’re at, you can still do interesting things. I guess this is also the original intention why I’ve always wanted to work in technology.

My mentality is quite strange. My anxiety doesn’t seem to come from the so-called Peer Pressure. In this field, not to mention peers, there are too many experts who might be much younger than me. On the contrary, participating in such events and seeing these possibilities and the people I want to become, alleviates my negative emotions quite a bit.

This week, I listened to Geekplux and Randy’s podcast channel “Beyond Code”. They are both seniors that I really like and have had some contact with. Listening to them chat is a very enjoyable thing. They’re not talking about any specific technical details or teaching, but you can feel that even though the show is called “Beyond Code”, their lives have already become inseparable from the technology and code they love.

What left a deep impression on me was also Randy talking about the issue of the desire to share. He said that when he first started playing with Twitter, he always wanted to share some of his thoughts and feelings, but now he always worries about whether it would be “too much”. I think although the situations are not the same, I also share less than before because I’m worried that my input, output, or ideas are a bit messy. I seem to be a bit timid about sharing information that hasn’t been sorted out and organized.

tg_channel_survey

Reorx also initiated such a survey in his channel before. Because my channel was initially a fork version of his channel, I also had similar confusion around the same time period. But later I thought about it and decided not to give myself too much mental burden. I just added an extra layer of self-questioning before sharing, requiring it to be content that I’ve read carefully and gained something from, rather than just seeing recommended or some “seemingly” useful resource integration. As for the rest, I’ll just focus on improving the value and purity of my input and output.

I also heard them talk about many topics, including work, growth, different living environments, plans after leaving a job, AI, etc. I also heard that Randy might produce some tutorials and courses. I benefited a lot from his small book “Next.js Application Development Practice” before. Some later projects were completely carried out according to this practice. The way of presentation and depth are very suitable for people who want to do some small projects independently. Looking forward to it.

Vanishing Sleep

I don’t know if it’s because working remotely at home blurs the sense of time, but my schedule has been getting more and more outrageous recently. Sometimes even though I’ve finished work, I still don’t go to sleep until three or four in the morning. I wake up once around 9 am, but occasionally I just turn off the alarm and sleep through it. I start handling work and various things around 11 am, until midnight, and the cycle repeats.

Actually, I feel like my body’s load is still okay, but I increasingly feel that sleep does easily affect my mental state. I always feel like if I sleep too late, the next day lacks a sense of reality. Because I just recovered from COVID-19, I haven’t started morning runs yet, but I bought a yoga mat planning to do some basic indoor exercise and fitness, and I’ve also picked up Ring Fit Adventure, which I had only progressed halfway through.

Now, possibly because I’m always in a state of fatigue when it’s time to sleep, I rarely have any dreams. But on the few days when I do, I seem to always recall some things from the past. The thoughts are distant yet real. I often used to say that May always seems to be quite bad every year. Now there’s only one day left in May. I hope June, a month I really like, will bring some improvements.

Nie Nie

Nie Nie has finally regained her spirit. Now she runs around everywhere. When I’m working or doing overtime, she lies on my legs or on the floor beside me. She’s so well-behaved.

nie_nie_in_hangzhou_1

nie_nie_in_hangzhou_3

nie_nie_in_hangzhou_2

Interesting Things and Objects

Mastodon

This week, due to some work-related matters, I started to look at some Mastodon materials in detail again. Compared to the last time I learned about it, I saw two new articles and several projects:

Mainly because public servers generally set some rate limits and so on, I was thinking about building one myself. But since I actually only need to use support for the Mastodon API, and don’t really need to handle so many connections or complex interactive interfaces, I learned about the following projects, which I might set up and play with:

go-mastodon is an SDK for calling through go. Wildebeest is mostly based on Cloudflare’s free services, and after setting it up, it won’t require much additional operation and maintenance management, which is quite worry-free. pub is a lightweight bridge application that supports minimal API access but doesn’t need to implement complex functions. gotosocial is a more feature-complete application that consumes moderate resources.

It feels like the Fediverse comes in waves, with very few people actually speaking on it. I guess I’ll just treat it as my own little paradise.

Input

Although most interesting inputs are automatically synchronized in the “Yu’s Life” Telegram channel, I still select some to list here. It feels more like a newsletter.

Articles

Videos

Recording some interesting videos I’ve watched:

PrivacyIN ZK Camp Week2: Basic Principles of the Classic ZK Protocols

Podcasts

Recording some interesting podcasts I’ve listened to:

Anime

Demon Slayer: Swordsmith Village Arc, it’s so exciting!
Oshi no Ko, because I’m watching on Netflix, I might be a few episodes behind, but I was a bit moved when I saw the part about imitating love
The Long Season, it’s been a long time since I watched a Chinese drama series. It was quite popular recently, so I slowly caught up on it this weekend as it’s not very long. The quality of the plot is still very good.

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Author

pseudoyu

Backend & Smart Contract Developer, MSc Graduate in ECIC(Electronic Commerce and Internet Computing) @ The University of Hong Kong (HKU). Love to learn and build things. Follow me on GitHub

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