Simplifying and reducing clutter in my life and work

post, Oct 14, 2019 on Mitja Felicijan's blog

I recently moved my main working machine back from Hachintosh to Linux. Well the -experiment was interesting and I have done some great work on macOS but it was -time to move back.

I actually really missed Linux. The simplicity of apt-get or just the amount -of software that exists for Linux should be a no-brainer. I spent most of my -time on macOS finding solutions to make things work. Using -Brew was just a horrible experience and far from package -managers of Linux. At least they managed to get that sudo debacle sorted.

Not all was bad. macOS in general was a perfectly good environment. Things like -Docker and tooling like this worked without any hiccups. My normal tools like -coding IDE worked flawlessly and the whole look and feel is just superb. I have -been using MacBook Air for couple of years so I was used to the system but never -as a daily driver.

One of the things I did after I installed Linux back on my machine was cleaning -up my Dropbox folder. I have everything on Dropbox. Even projects folder. I -write code for living so my whole life revolves around couple of megs of code -(with assets). So it's not like I have huge files on my machine. I don't have -movies or music or pictures on my PC. All of that stuff is in cloud. I use -Google music and I have Netflix account which is more than enough for me.

I also went and deleted some of the repositories on my Github account. I have -deleted more code than deployed. People find this strange but for me deleting -something feels so cathartic and also forces me to write better code next time -around when I am faced with similar problem. That was a huge relief if I am -being totally honest.

Next step was to do something with my webpage. I have been using some scripts I -wrote a while ago to generate static pages from markdown source posts. I kept on -adding and adding stuff on top of it and it became a source of a -frustration. And this is just a simple blog and I was using gulp and npm. -Anyways after couple of hours of searching and testing static generators I found -an interesting one -https://github.com/piranha/gostatic and I -just decided to use this one. It was the only one that had a simple templating -engine, not that I really need one. But others had this convoluted way of trying -to solve everything and at the end just required quite bigger learning curve I -was ready to go with. So I deleted couple of old posts, simplified HTML, trashed -most of the CSS and went with -https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ -aesthetics. Yeah, the previous site was more visually stimulating but all I -really care is the content at this point. And Times New Roman font is kind of -awesome.

I stopped working on most of the projects in the past couple of months because -the overhead was just too insane. There comes a point when you stretch yourself -too much and then you stop progressing and with that comes dissatisfaction.

So that's about it. Moving forward minimal style.