Weeknotes 2023 W32: Dreadful

August 7​–​13, 2023
1000 words

Quick bits:

I spent the beginning of the week at a team offsite, which was surprisingly good. While I don’t think it was necessary per se, getting together in the same physical location is helpful for tackling topics that are tough to do in the occasional video call here and there.

I wish I had taken more breaks during this offsite. More and more, I find that taking breaks, like going on a walk or meditating, really helps to reset and get new perspectives. The weather unfortunately wasn’t too conducive to taking walks.

Right before and after the offsite, I spent some time in the office, and I can confidently say that I’m incredibly glad to work from home. It’s a typical office: not enough sunlight, carpeted floors, small kitchen, and sad overhead lighting. Offices like these sucks the life out of me.

Remote working still works very well for me. I’ve created a home-office environment that is so much better than the average office environment. Having no commute frees up so much time, too. I’m fitter, happier, more productive overall. My environment allows me to take proper breaks, which I find essential.

Having not been in an office for so long made me forget how truly dreadful they are.

In unrelated news: I have started drafting a new horror short story set in an office environment. It’s mostly freewriting and I have no idea where the story is really going yet.

Friends are having a music composition challenge. It looks like so much fun, and I’m envious — not because I’d like to participate (I wouldn’t know where to start), but because I’d love to have a fiction writing challenge.

Here’s how it could work: take two weeks to draft up a short story, and then provide critique for each other. Rinse and repeat. Who’d be up for that? Where are you, fellow short fiction writers? Reveal yourselves!

It’d be challenging because I generally take quite some time to write my stories, but this would push me to get stuff written, even if it’s far from perfect. I need to remind myself that I’m writing for myself first and foremost. I have this piece of advice stuck in my head: “The first draft is for you, and subsequent drafts are for somebody else” (I don’t remember where that quote is from, sadly).

Over the past few weeks, I picked up work on my budgeting app prototype again. It’s been going on for a while; at this rate, it’ll become usable in about five years.

I’m using Wails and it’s rather enjoyable. The heavy lifting is done in Go, which means that I can build a command-line tool and create a GUI from the same codebase.

The biggest issue with writing a budgeting app is that budgeting itself is not at all straightforward to do — there are so many tricky aspects. I’ve made it a bit difficult for myself with building the app with multi-currency support from scratch, and based on double-entry accounting. There does not seem to be enough quality prior art to take inspiration from.

Here’s one example of a tricky situation: If I purchase tickets in August for a performance in October, do I budget for that in October or in August? If I budget in August, I might blast through my entertainment budget for the month without getting anything for it in August. It seems like adding it to the October budget is more reasonable, or perhaps spreading it out over August, September, and October. But then, the budgeting app would need to support transactions that consume budget from future months: the purchase is now but the purchase only creates value in the future.

I’m half tempted to take a crash course in accounting to figure out how to do handle all this properly rather than continually stumbling and failing.

Entertainment:

I cancelled Amazon Prime last week (see Week­notes 2023 W31: Reduced caffeine), but that also automatically cancelled my associated Paramount+ subscription, which means I can no longer watch the shows I was watching (Star Trek Strange New Worlds in particular). I suppose I could sign up for Paramount+ independently. Ugh, why is watching movies and TV so hard these days?

Links:

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Incoming links: Weeknotes 2023 W33: Critique.