I don’t often interact with fan-bases for FOSS projects, instead as a developer I mostly interact with maintainers and contributors. Sometimes the maintainers are incredibly abrasive and belittling to issue contributors for seemingly no reason. When I observe this, it makes me think twice about opening a new issue under that project. In fact, at this moment I’m considering building my own alternative to a FOSS project for this exact reason!

Edit: I know this might seem like an extreme response, but I’m also looking for a good excuse for a side-project. Depending on the project it might be worth it to brace yourself against the bristles to try and reach common ground. It could be that the maintainer(s) don’t even know that they’re coming off a certain way. But YMMV.

I’m keeping my eyes on Locus: https://github.com/Myzel394/locus

I am quite sure I have ADHD (though not officially diagnosed), with that in mind here’s my story.

There’s a veritable cornucopia of programs and systems available to utilize when it comes to keeping digital notes, and none of them stick for me. I desperately want them to work, because I loathe writing things by hand due to hand cramps and poor penmanship. The thing I get hung up on a lot is getting comfortable in a certain software-based note-taking ecosystem and then running straight into a wall when I want it to do one particular thing I’ve identified as being useful, or perhaps the software just becomes unreliable for one reason or another. It’s highly demotivating to me when I realize I’ve spent hours using something only for it to end up not working for me the way I wanted it to. Also, when I write digital notes, I have a very bad habit of editing, as if someone other than myself were to read my notes later (irrational, I know), so the process takes much longer than if I were to put the pen to paper.

The thing about pen and paper is, it just works. I might run out of paper or ink, but assuming I have access to more, I can write whatever and however I want. Sure, I don’t get automation or full-text search “out of the box”, but I can devise my own systems (short-hand, indexing, etc.) or borrow someone else’s (Bullet Journal), even use external tools (scan document | OCR) to meet my needs when the time comes.

Right now I’m in the middle of building a habit of keeping a small journal on my person where I keep very simple remarks about my day and track personal tasks and events. I’m explicitly only using systems that I find useful and nearly effortless, but as I improve the habit I will try adding more complexity. I feel that if I can develop a solid core of analog writing, then it’s likely I can begin to introduce more regular digital note-taking to augment this core practice.

I don’t believe there is one method that works (or is even beneficial) for everyone, rather I think it’s more important for individuals to find a method (or hybrid) that works for them, and stick to it.

Congrats on graduating and landing a full-time job! 🎉

As an RSS-enjoyer perhaps you can help me. I want to get better about using RSS to stay connected and updated with the world. Right now I’m using Feeder for Android and I’ve got some feeds from a couple news publications, some Rust dev feeds, and some of my favorite podcasts, but I find that I get little value out of this. Do you have any recommendations on how to squeeze the most out of RSS? How do you decide what’s worthwhile to subscribe to?