Levers
What are the obvious ways to make your life better?
- I bought an electric bike, and this was my first week commuting with it. It was extremely rad; my commute got cut from 25 minutes to roughly nine. It cost, uh, a lot of money; I can do the whole rational value-of-my-time justification and say well, it’s saving me three hours a week at minimum and if I value my time at even just a hundred bucks an hour, that adds up really quickly, and that’s totally fair. But I’m also comfortable with just, you know, buying the feeling of being consecrated by the wind every morning as I sail down Pike.
- I also bought a sleep mask for around twelve dollars and fifty cents. I now fall asleep thirty minutes quicker than usual. The mental arithmetic on this is a little easier to stomach.
- I spent an entire Sunday a couple months ago setting up a bunch of linting and formatting rules for Buttondown. This was a tremendous pain, a labyrinth of ESLint and Webpack and pre-commit hooks — an Escherian architecture of duct tape and sound intentions. It was totally worth it, though; it only saves like ten seconds from each commit, but I hated those ten seconds. Now, every time I write some code, it magically looks like way it’s supposed to look, each indentation and trailing comma a little miracle of mise en place.
- I also spent some time pairing with a coworker a couple weeks ago and discovered reverse history searching. I’ve been living inside a terminal for almost ten years ago and never knew this existed.
Electric bicycles and complex build steps are cool and good and I like them a whole bunch, but I am very curious about the mundane levers everyone carries around in their pockets, having forgotten long ago the novelty of it.
Happy Sunday.
I hope you find a new favorite shortcut. (And also, buy a sleep mask.)