Quick Note#

I had previously aimed to publish a post every Friday as a weekly recap of my time at Recurse Center. Clearly, that plan hasn’t quite panned out; this is my third post and my second that I’m writing “late” on Monday. Instead of making myself feel guilty about not meeting my initial goal, I’m going to recognize that I didn’t take into account the fact that the end of the week is by far the most difficult part of the week for me, and the end of the day is when I have the least motivation for anything. Trying to get myself to consistently write on Friday afternoons was a bit out of touch with my actual rhythm. I don’t want to get rid of the goal entirely, so instead I’ll make a small shift: the goal now is to post something every Monday morning, which feels a lot more doable for me!

Week 3 Recap - Impossible Week#

The character creator hasn’t seen much progress this past week. I’m not abandoning it, but I am recognizing that I was having trouble finding the motivation to work on it. I spent a couple days re-writing parts of it I had already written, then deleting that and doing it again slightly differently, and rinse and repeat. This wasn’t going anywhere, and was getting frustrating.

Then came “Impossible Day” at Recurse Center! Impossible Day is a day dedicated to trying something that feels, well, impossible. Something beyond the edge of your abilities. The idea isn’t to finish anything, but rather to see how far you get and explore what you’re really capable of. In concert with my goals for my batch, I decided to work on a desktop app with Wails and Svelte. Since my character creator isn’t ready to plug in as a backend, I chose to try out making something else, and landed on an RSS reader, which I’ve since dubbed impossibleRSS. I ended up having so much fun working on impossibleRSS that I just kept working on it all week!

At first I felt a little guilty, like I was “abandoning” the character creator. But I haven’t abandoned it. Instead, just like tweaking my goal around when I post here, by shifting my current focus to impossibleRSS I am really just accommodating myself by allowing myself to “follow the dopamine” to what currently motivates me. This isn’t a job, I don’t have anyone telling me I need to get X features completed by Y date. Without external pressures and deadlines, I need to work with myself to find motivation, and sometimes that means putting one project down in favor of another.

That said, the character creator isn’t going anywhere, and I very much still want to return to it. I’m hoping a couple weeks away from it will help clear my mind and allow me to approach it from a new perspective. So for this week, I will continue working on impossibleRSS for as long as the hyperfocus fuels me!

A Few Notes about impossibleRSS#

With impossibleRSS, I’m trying out a few new things on top of Wails & Svelte, including:

  1. shadcn-svelte for beautiful components to use in the Svelte frontend
    • This comes along with tailwind, which I have somehow also never used before
  2. sqlc for generating type-safe go code from sql queries
    • I’m using this in concert with sql-migrate (which I have used before) to interact with and manage a sqlite database

So far, I’m enjoying the interop between the Go backend and the JavaScript frontend. Being able to call Go methods from JavaScript code is a really nice feature, and I’m excited to start incorporating events to improve communication around feed syncing.

Tomorrow is “Half Baked Demos” day at Recurse Center, and I’m excited to share with folks the (currently very half-baked) state of impossibleRSS then!