Skipping The Web Frameworks For a More Fundamental Approach to Dev
I'm exploring a more fundamental approach to web development, skipping the web frameworks and focusing on muscle memory, Linux, Python, vim, and git. I'm combining these tools to create the MyKoz project, an automated video recording system of ChatBot responses. I'm also utilizing nbdev to help me with this project.
Exploring My Digital Autonomy with LPvg and MyKoz
By Michael Levin
Saturday, August 26, 2023
Okay, put a big emphasis on those things that are immediately helpful to you, your career, your mindset and such. Writing for the sake of writing might feel good and help you be mindful and find intent. But it also has the ability to put you right on the edge of following though with that intent when so many things are digital in life these days. So DO that follow-through. Today had some good examples with what I did with the blog release system improvements. Yesterday I built HTMX-ready webdev into the MyKoz.AI project. That’s another good example. And I’m about to follow through on the MyKoz.AI ability to do automated video recordings of ChatBot responses as a sort of new age SERP tracking.
Easy tools? No, not so easy. Tools for life? Yes, certainly in most of the choices. When it comes to the WebDev part of the equation, that’s up to how static HTML remains, haha! There’s no way I’m taking up a JavaScript front-end library like the “much beloved” ReactJS. Nope. I looked into them from time to time, back to the days of Twitter BootstrapJS and jquery being the two big things. Yeah, I even did some WebDeb work then. But it doesn’t take much WebDev to keep you away from WebDev if you’re the kind of casual developer who doesn’t have the mental capacity to dedicate to the nuances of ReactJS. It reminds me of Adobe software. You have to make it a way of life, or you’re out.
So I was mostly out of Web Development. Life after HitTail was just dabbling with tech. But not being responsible for any single instance of a running something or other, I was free to explore unbounded and figure out what it really was I wanted. And as it turns out, it’s muscle memory. We Enjoy Typing. Or WET. It’s the opposite of Don’t Repeat Yourself. Or DRY. Dry is big in the Ruby community, and I couldn’t stand it. It was nice for awhile as the novelty held promise. But then I realized how limiting enforced object oriented for everything really means. It set me up for an increased appreciation for Python when I eventually was to open my mind to it.
But first I explored a whole bunch of stuff to get something timeless and future-proof. My timing was funny because it was just before NodeJS burst onto the scene in 2009. I had been doing my tech pondering since around 2007, not long after HitTail. But then the urgency set on me to pick something I wouldn’t have to keep re-learning because I internally drew a line in the sand. By 2010 I had started calling my new “platform” or whatever it was LPvg, for Linux, Python, vim and git. In my estimation, these four items had it covered. It was a long circuitous route getting there. I tried my hand at JavaScript front-ends. But as bookmarklets that connected to Python back-ends.
There were some cool tricks involving JavaScript booklets hitting against
something that could do crawling (Python), and also had API-hooks into Google
Sheets, and that would crawl sites directly into Google Docs. That was fun for
awhile and fundamental-feeling as the Amiga computer back in the day, and
Microsoft .asp pages. So much tech I’ve developed expertise in and so much
that lets us down, all the more so if muscle memory were involved. My text
editor through those days was Edit Plus, which is still a pretty good editor.
But it’s another example of one of those tools that’s platform-bound and not
part of either the fabric of tech or some eternal FOSS community.
Few things are as big in your life as your text editor. Maybe your chair, your bed, and whoever you live with. But you’re probably going to spend a lot of time typing. Or at least you will if you intend to be able to express your agency and autonomy in the digital world. It’s easy to think a thing. It’s also easy to talk a thing, conversation-wise. But it lacks the structure required to execute a command on a machine with the sort of high degree of reliability that systems are built on. Sure, you can use Alexa or Siri to set a timer. But try to get a system to take a video for you of a web search every day that captures it as a video that can be automatically emailed, web-published or whatever.
And so these are the pieces I’m gluing together in MyKoz. There are some interesting discrete pieces coming together. I can see already I’m going to be coming right out of the starting gate with nbdev.