Since my last post on setting up a caffeine widget, I’ve been drawn back into customizing my rice. It’s been interesting to come back to all the widgets I wrote back in college and look at them with a couple years of experience. Notably, some event-loop-blocking operations and a bunch of places where I chose to go the route of polling a shell command over using event-based triggers. I understand that the gains here are marginal (especially when I have, like, three Electron apps running at all times), but what kind of engineer am I if I don’t try to eke out every last CPU cycle from my machine?

If you were misled by the title to think this was some analysis of my broken sleep schedule and completely unrelated caffeine addiction, you can rest assured that this post has nothing to do with it. In recent times, the only technical things I play around with outside of work are my rice and this website, so I figured I should write about that. I’m going to try and see if I can finish this in one sitting, which will hopefully set the precedent for me to write these posts more frequently and for smaller topics. To all three of my loyal subscribers, apologies if the quality here has declined (what standards were you expecting, anyway?😞).

This one’s pretty much just going to be an unadulterated (stay away, word-probability machine!) stream of thought that’s been on my mind lately. I’ve increasingly been feeling that I spend much of my free hours consuming things (ideas, art, knowledge, food?) rather than creating them. On some especially tiring days, I feel like that might be okay. Why wouldn’t I want to rest after a long day? But on other days, where I’ve forced myself to just sit and do something, I end up feeling fulfilment rather than the notion that I’ve spent enough time awake to finally justify sleeping. While I do not align to the idea that every waking hour needs to be spent doing something productive, I do think it is a worthy pursuit.