Could be a painting, a story, a movie, woodworking, absolutely anything. Also why?
Webdev. Wanted to do this to increase my tech skills and insulate myself from several degrees of idiocy at work. Just haven’t had the wherewithal.
If you have the time, I’d recommend trying it out. Creating a basic webpage isn’t too hard, and you probably have the tools to get started on your computer already (you can do it with just Notepad and view it in any web browser! Although I would recommend downloading a free proper code editor such as VS Code).
Bruh, I’m talking about a crud app. Possibly running on the shiny framework. It’s not going to be trivial.
Imma be blunt. Maybe your attitude is contributing to the ‘Several degrees of idiocy at work’
Dudes tryin to be helpful with beginner tips and you jump down his throat. The irony of you saying crud isn’t trivial 😂
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Oh, okay. Still more doable than you might think, but of course not trivial. Good luck!
Let me ask, maybe you know: say I want to build a finance app that basically crunches a lot of data accessed from a DB, does some pretty intricate subsetting of the data, and produces Excel reports (XML). I currently do this with about 1300 lines of R code and a SQLite DB. Pretty lean and easy to use (was a bitch to write, tho, really stretched my understanding of lexical scoping and functional programming). If I wanted to webify this, the main challenge that I think I face is finding a framework that allows me to do all that nitty gritty data subsetting and summarizing - this is where R is really excellent, more flexible and expressive than SQL. What framework, if any, might you recommend? What kind of stack would be good for a beginner?
I think that’s a nice hot goal to have, but you’re shooting yourself in the foot by aiming so high (pardon the tortured metaphor). Start with the basics of webdev and work your way up.
Like I’m a senior dev, and for years I thought I understood frontend. Finally, I had to reckon that I did not, and took a course on how to build a web app using React on Typescript + various popular libraries (YMMV).
Yeah a lot of it was boring or stuff I mostly knew anyway, but actually sitting down and going to school on it, like with pencil and paper, was a big help. So now I can actually contribute to FE/web dev. And all those little things I feel I should know are either known, or knowable because now I understand what to search for.
Yeah. I’m like 46 now, and this just feeds into my “fuck it” mentality. Thanks for the input, seriously, that is not sarcasm.
Apologies for the wait!
Most good libraries for interacting with DBs and Excel documents are written for the backend, so you’ll probably want to use Node with a simple web server like Express to serve pages, and do your heavy calculations, report generation, and DB stuff on the Node server. Making a server seems complex but Express is quite easy-- you can get a functional web server in like 10 lines of code.
As for what framework would be good to use for the actual calculations, unfortunately I don’t have any recommendations. Generally I find that JS has enough by default to do decently complex grouping, summarizing, subsetting, calculating, etc. operations. You’ll probably want to use the “new” (now pretty old) array methods Map and Reduce, and new stuff like groupBy could be helpful. If you have any specific questions I should be able to answer them.
Have you tried discussing this with ChatGPT/Claude/Perplexity? I’ve found it extremely helpful for getting started, and exploring different options.
I’ve considered making a youtube channel discussing politics with a heavy emphasis on organizing unions. I’m extremely proud of my achievements as a part of a successful union campaign, and I want to share what I’ve learned, give folks some of my war stories, and teach people the political and practical necessities to organizing. The reason I haven’t is because I feel like I would get entirely drowned out in the political youtube space
I’d subscribe just to watch the comment sections.
LeftTube (definitely covered by union-oriented content) does a fairly good job of propping up important messages and messengers. You might try uploading a few videos and sharing them with the likes of Hasan Piker, TYT, Big Joel, Shaun, and PhilosophyTube (Abigail Thorn). Getting your videos in front of the right eyes can expose them to an enormous audience, and most of these people do nothing but consume recommended content in one way or another.
It almost never happens overnight, but I think there’s an importance to your story, and we need more union-centric content. Shoot me a link, and I’ll be a day-one subscriber.
i personally would love to hear your story
Sobriety
If you need a random mf to talk to hmu. Do it. You don’t gotta be a square just because you clean yourself up. You just may fuck up a few times, so may as well try sooner than later.
You’re a good one and thank you but no
What’s your poison?
Record an indie album with mostly acoustic instruments then send it off to a DJ to mix and master. It wouldn’t be a remix then, more of a collaboration.
Learning any instrument and creating music
Welding. I’m currently putting my woodworking on hold because of other project, so i really can’t start another until i finish the current one and finish whatever i’m trying to finish with my woodworking
I have several small ideas that seem like they’d go together in a work of fiction, but there are also so many gaps that seeing it ruins any forward thinking I might have about it.
The best way really is to just start. You might chop and change, write and rewrite, many times but you will find a way to make it come together. Writing notes and a list of plot points helps, or even writing out the separate sections and then finding a way to make them meet. Don’t get bogged down in the minutiae of sentences and paragraphs. Getting the bare bones down is your starting point. I used a spreadsheet and would add in new points and landmarks as and when they came to me. I still ended up spending ages editing, and adding, and amending until it felt right. Taxing but cathartic to get it all out.
I would add that writing it out, or preferably actually talking it out with someone, will take your ideas from the nebulous internal language of the mind, where they can be these indistinct perfect concepts that capture whatever it is you’re about at the moment… anyway, it will take them from that beautiful but unreal state, into real memes that have to be described with language and imagery and all its limitations.
The first time you speak your whole synopsis out loud, even if it sounds a bit hollow, that’s when you’re idea is born into the real world.
A sequel to my first novel that people regularly ask me about 12 years after I finished it. I published it myself and sold to friends, family, work acquaintances. Two young kids and a busy job wildly delayed any free time I might have for grand modern fantasy. One of these years.
Can I have a copy?
I want to get into a little machining and welding.
Unfortunately I have a smallish townhome that doesn’t leave me much room for a workshop, and even if I had the space, I’d probably have to go in to the tune of a few hundred if not thousands of dollars worth of machines, tooling, equipment, and materials pretty quickly, and I have other things to blow my money on.
I generally just like working with my hands, making things, figuring out problems, etc. and having some machining projects to figure out seems like a good way to fill in the gaps left by a pretty shitty math curriculum in my high school (I’ve probably learned more trig from watching some machining videos and only half paying attention than I did taking an actual trig class)
Why not 3d print? I’ve taught myself a ton of CAD and sm now learning surface modeling. When I’m ready for a CNC, I’ll be ready.
I also want to get into 3d printing, and probably will before I find space for a lathe and mill
But that kind of scratches two different itches for me. I know there’s a bit more to it, but pressing a button and letting the machine do most of the work doesn’t really appeal to me, I want to do it manually.
There’s also the issue of materials, I don’t often find myself needing/wanting a plastic part, but I do find myself wishing I could get some custom made metal pieces
Nothing about 3D printing is set-and-forget when you’re designing from the ground up…
The designing is involved to be sure, but it’s the actual hands-on experience of making a physical object that’s the fun part to me and with 3d printing and CNC that’s pretty hands-off by design. There’s some fine tuning, tinkering, and adjusting to do to the machines to be sure, but once the design is set and you have the machine dialed in, you’re mostly just letting the machine run and keeping an eye on it in case it starts making spaghetti.
I’d rather be the reason its accidentally making spaghetti.
I just constantly have ideas that need a lot of setup and never have any time.
contact microphones on a canvas run through distortion making noise art is probably the most likely thing to happen next, but again I never seem to find the time.
user name checks out
Your mangled brain would like you to know that there is a boxer called Contact Mike.
I want to buy an old police cruiser (crown Vic) and chop it up into a rally car, and do the gambler 500.
Pottery and learning blender and creating characters which I then can animate
I wanna learn more about poetry. I love reading poetry. I’ve written some too. Some of those even got published. But I feel like I don’t really understand how it works. I can write decent lines, make things rhyme, or not if that fits the tone better. But I don’t really understand why it works, if you know what I mean.
I guess I kind of want to study about how to analyze and appreciate poetry in a structured way. I wanted to take a few courses, but I’m in USA and they only have courses on Western poetry, which I’m not really that interested in. (It definitely very good, but I’m more fascinated with Indian, especially Bengali poetry. That’s what I grew up with.)
So yeah, IDK how to do it. But I’ll love to. Maybe I can mail some professors and ask for books? Or maybe actual poets might be better? I’m not sure. But I’ll love to do it one day.
Look for online courses, like that archive of free MIT lectures. I wouldn’t be surprised if you found something worthwhile.
I haven’t been able to find anything like that yet.
Try these https://ocw.mit.edu/search/?q=Poetry
If you’ve had poems published without really understanding poetry itself, you may naturally have an intuitive grasp on poetry. I think it would be interesting if you continued writing and reflect on what you write, how you write it, and how you feel while writing it. Maybe write a poem expressing your feelings on poetry!
Then again, studying could give you better means and terminology to express your internal understanding. Either way, I wish you well!
I would read this
A novel. First because I’m not sure on some key aspects of the plot, second because I’m not an amazing writer
you wont get any better at writing by avoiding it. start writing out your current key plot points and see if your pen can guide you towards some others
Also maybe check out the “snowball” outlining method. There’s no secret sauce, except whatever actually gets you writing
What the other person said: practice in public. You’ll learn faster and actually get stuff done. It’ll feel like walking down Main Street with no clothes on, but you’ll actually make progress.
I started a writing club on here specifically because I’m such trash at holding myself accountable to creative stuff. And it’s not like I’m Isaac Asimov now, but I’m definitely making more stuff than if I hadn’t tried.
Anyway, I know it’s easier said than done, and actual execution can feel so uncomfortable, but I recommend it.
I actually did start once, but didn’t get very far.
I wanted to design a mall out of Legos. I got it all set up on Stud.io, and I even started making an entrance with doors, lights, a drive-up and a little park. I’m not good with the building techniques, so it’s a super basic flat wall and everything. Also it takes a long time to do much of anything in that program.
