i hope u like the new blog format. i figure a couple lines of css to tidy it wouldn't hurt.
the last week or so i have been swimming in web dev learning. drowning in it. i'm building a twitter clone on a new tech stack (which i am following a tutorial for. after i finish this i want to start mass producing crud apps with my acquired knowledge). this is my high code web dev experience, in which i am learning all these new applied things i dabbled in in college like typescript and databases and prisma and planetscale and authentication (if you haven't figured it out, it is the t3 stack. Thanks theo). and on the other side, i am learning in a low code environment. i've been working at a small web dev company making wordpress sites for small businesses. its quite fun and i get to build web apps using elementor and wordpress. i have been enjoying it and my boss is a great guy. im enjoying the work. sometimes i get to mess with writing a couple lines of custom css, and im probably not using the wysiwyg to its full strength but its fun to build things that are valuable
and in my free time, ive been spending so much time reading on twitter. it makes me sad how many things there are and how much i want to think and learn. unfortunately each day seems to end around 10 or 11 pm and my brain will go into rest mode where i will spend my hours watching formula 1 and racing content. if i have the energy ill get to play forza or assetto corsa, but i dont play so much lately. if you look at my github you can clearly see the couple months in which i was playing more than learning LOL
its silly because ive been learning so fast and much, it makes me dislike this current iteration of sammartinelli.com. it's primitive and shoddy and ugly. it's low tech and doesn't pop up first on google or bing. i need to improve my seo i think. it has been bringing me down a bit that there are other sam martinellis who are more relevant than me. i want to be number 1. i will become the number one sam martinelli. however it seems like every 6 months or so i do a full rewrite of my site and im never happy with it so whatever. i think the current iteration is cute. ill check some other projects to see how i can imrpove my seo.
i am going to a virtual career fair tomorrow and i hope it goes well. the last one i went to i wasn't passionate and didn't really care to speak to anyone and i woke up late and my hair was messy during the one on ones. i didn't have any of the recruiters reach back to me, but i didnt really want to work back then anyway. this was around may this year and i had just graduated and i wanted to Rest... but now im on the grind. i want to learn and contribute.
for quite a while, i really disdained the fact that i had gone to college. i felt it wasn't helping me in my job search and that it had been pointless. but lately i have had a shift and i am grateful that i got the experience. call it nostalgia but its been nice. lots of good things happened. i learned to code, i learned some of the thought processes behind computing and math that i wouldn't have found in a self-taught route, and i met my current gf :3 she's awesome. sometimes she reads these. she's so awesome and smart. the other day i had chest pain and she knew exactly why and how. so cool. UGH she's awesome.
i think i need to go to san diego more. sleep in my car or crash a couch. i need to get out of the house. i want to connect / reconnect with people smarter than me and learn what they are doing and what makes them able to. i wasn't the friendliest in college (i was often bitter and resentful. i still am a bit edgy. more than id like to be. it's because of fear of rejection) but maybe i can change it. but unfortunately a desire to be smart and accepted doesn't make me smart nor accepted
i still feel pretty bummed that covid ripped away most of what i felt were my chances to meet people enthusiastic about coding, but knowing myself i had such bad anxiety and imposter syndrome that whenever i met those type of people in college i was too nervous to really get into it. i was too busy with school to be passionate about learning about other things anyway. now i have all this free time i get to spend it learning as i please. hoping that this current wave of energy lasts for a while. i get on these crazes sometimes and then in a couple weeks i will go on a video game retreat where i do not do anything for weeks to months. (reading this again, it may be called a Slump.) each learning craze is good fun and every time i learn a little more but i hope that this momentum wave will carry into more things this time. i want to start making things and contributing to open source. im starting by making this twitter clone from a tutorial. its humbling and i feel a little stuck in tutorial hell but I WILL BREAK OUT! i will do great things. not because of my goals but my systems. i am improving them day by day. but if i had to pick i would pick a quiet and peaceful life over one ruined by ambition. i have to remember that when i go on these crazes.
if my grandparents read this: my sleep schedule is getting better. i wake up most days in the morning now. today it was afternoon and i was awoken by the government alarm test that happened today. personally, i'd be in favor of the government setting a wakeup alarm everyday at lets say 10 am or so because it'd probably fix my sleep schedule (this is a joke) (note to self: look into getting an alarm tone that is the emergency alarm from the government. this would be good because 1. it is loud and would wake me up and 2. it is funny and may cause slight chaos if around other people
anyway i jsut wanted to get my words out today. thanks for reading. these blogs are more a journal than a blog of anything helpful lol
bonus section to talk about the cool things i've learned and some thoughts: NOBODY TOLD ME THAT ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES WERE SO EASY. i've been trying to learn apis for MONTHs. MONTHS! and i start watching one tutorial on building a twitter clone and it all clicks to me. i feel STUPID for not figuring that out for so long. like you literally just have .env files locally (dont put on github) and then on vercel you paste what the env variables are. thats it. but its because i was Learning and not Making. once i tried Making, all the topics i learned about clicked and made sense. now once i make for myself. boom bang dude. its over. it will all make sense...
crud apps are so silly because everything is crud. it really seems like crud apps should be a lot easier to make than they are. but i suppose it depends how in depth you want it to be. and how much of it is your own. and how much you want to pay. that's the big one. wordpress and elementor make me go "why the hell would i ever build things on my own?" but then i try building things and its like. oh dude its so customizable. typing things is so much better and precise sometimes than gui's. but man it's SLOW so i get the gui app makers.
while im in this fever of learning, it makes me appreciate the value of services that do things for you. for jobs and production reasons, it makes sense bc you're paid hourly. when you're in learning frenzy, you dont want to spend hours and hours trying to fiddle with google cloud to try to get a single thing to work (i couldnt)
anyway. if you're looking for a long story made short: don't use google cloud.
see yall next week
sam