How does one even begin to prioritize and choose between longer-term undertakings spanning several months or more? Based on the limited experience of my own life, I find it difficult to place much confidence in my careful rationalizations when evaluating several options, particularly when each contributes to distinct buckets or “burners”¹ in one’s life. Not only must I contend with the uncertainty of each option’s outcome, but also the expected ancillaries of each as well as their opportunity costs given present alternatives.

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I finally decided to make the trek out of my apartment today to replenish on groceries after more than a week of quarantining myself, and in the midst of widespread self-quarantining to limit spread of the coronavirus. By the standards of any normal day, it would be relatively uneventful and mundane. However, the combination of a looming possibility of catching the most infamous virus in a generation, the ambiance of a city extraordinarily devoid of faces, and my almost total solitude in preceding days made the most mundane of activities such as disembarking from a bus feel surreal. At first, I found myself even going out of my way to avoid eye contact with other passengers, as if that’s how one gets sick. Once past the hump of remembering how to comport myself in (the light of spattering of) public, I still found myself continually distracted by an effort to maximize my distance from every other individual. My best efforts at social distancing towered over the highest shelves at the supermarket, competing with the warning signs plastered throughout the city to add an undertone of stress and concern I immediately wanted to shrink away from. The sunlight, ostensibly free of viral connotations, served only as a reminder of the impending return to my walled refuge and the bathing in artificial light that would ensue.

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What is pride? I was in a conversation some few weeks ago with a friend in which they claimed to feel pride because of the country they were from, in contrast to many other places which handled the issue in question differently. At the time, this seemed like a normal turn of conversation, as expressing national pride is anything but uncommon. Later on, however, I started to wonder what this actually implied.

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I started this daily notes sub-blog to have a more frictionless way to post daily thoughts without the commitment of composing a full blog post. The #100Days challenge which requires writing and publishing a post every day for a hundred consecutive days seemed like an appropriate endeavor, particularly in this time of self-quarantining due to the coronavirus which necessitates more solitary activities. I’m interested in the implications of obligating oneself to capture a fleeting thought and develop it into a coherent narrative, every single day.

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Note: This isn’t the type of post I expected to write when setting up this blog, but given the extraordinarily long hiatus since my last post and nonexistent readership (most posts are primarily written to help me structure my thoughts), it seems as worthy as any.

Moments devoid of thought are often scarce in a world dominated by notifications and messages from seemingly every direction, but I am regularly impressed by their value. During a recent such standstill, I found myself reflecting on the factors outside of my life that made my life experiences over the last few years as enjoyable and fulfilling as they were.

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(This tutorial is incomplete, but was first given in its complete form as a talk at a Michigan Hackers event on 2015-07-23. See my slides here. I have explained the first portion of the content here in more depth.)

I will start by talking about some basics of Clojure, then move onto explaining the fundamental purpose of a backend in web development, and finish with a demo of a simple web app (with complete code) that you can deploy to Heroku with a one-click button or try out on another platform of your choice.

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It’s a surprisingly simple process to setup S3 syncing with a static site generator with source that you sync using Git. This will allow you to track revision history on your actual writing of posts, etc. while having the generated site automatically deployed on S3 on each push.

All you really need is:

1. A way to upload a folder to S3 (I use the excellent s3cmd)
2. A hook that triggers the upload on every git push

For example, if your static site generator is hugo, with destination dir public (like Hugo by default) and your S3 bucket is called <example_bucket>, create a new shell script called pre-push in the .git/hooks directory of your site source as follows:

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