Willa Magland
Beautiful Things in Bad Times
Posted Jan 6, 2024
As you may already know, my dad is a software engineer, so technology is something I grew up with. I think it was around 13 or 14 when I started learning my first programming language, python, experimenting in various Google Collab notebooks. I remember my first program I was proud of was a text-adventure style recreation of the Portal 2 opening. The user would type in commands of what they'd do in the game, and it would play audio files grabbed from the game's wiki page.
All those files are since lost, but their effects remain. After moving to VSCode and real, .py files, my dad introduced me to Github, a place to store programming projects and "back them up" in a way. My github is now four years old, and has more private repositories than public ones, full of weekend scripts, a backup of my Obsidian vault, when I used that, and other files I haven't touched for years.
Just this past weekend, my family did a presentation night, and my dad gave his on the more practical, non-programming related ways to use github, such has task management, setting goals, and keeping notes. This got me thinking about my github account, and today I decided to browse and see what was on there.
The first thing that caught my eye were the two discord bots, Bug and Joyous, I had made, the latter a successor to the former. They never did anything incredible, but simply handed out cups of coffee, had a slot machine, fetched the latest xkcd, and so on, but they were really fun to make. Maybe a bit annoying for the people in the servers I tested them in, but we ended up with some pretty goofy commands.
!amigay
calculating gayness.... @user, I can confirm you are, in fact, gay.
The other thing that really surprised me was an old repository of dotfiles I'd made for my laptop. These are little scripts and configuration files I'd written to customize i3wm, because i3wm was the ONLY wm I could figure out how to use. My setup included top and bottom bars, workspace & theme switching, plus some really cute icons. And I've got to say, it looked good...
I think that often we forget how hard we've worked in the past. I had certainly forgotten the hours and love I'd put into these projects, and all the fun I had while doing them, even though they were positive. I think they got lumped in with other things I was struggling with at the same time, so when I looked back, they faded into the background, and I would have forgotten them, had it not been for github.
So, I guess there's a myriad of things I can learn here,
- Github / Gitlab / Codeberg whatever is great, and that backups are important.
- Good things can have happened during a bad time, and when you're living through a bad time, you can still create beautiful things.
Those are my 11:00 A.M. thoughts. Only 4 days and 7 hours until I'm eighteen! Wowza!
Willa.
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