Hey there - I’m Alan and this is my intro

. First, I’m on Mastodon and we should totally follow each other there https://hachyderm.io/deck/@TheIdOfAlan

. This is gonna be long because, like Pascal said, I don’t have time to write something shorter

. Please take everything I say with the picture of a person who’s pretty energetic and genuinely excited about whatever it is they are saying. (I’m very rarely severe in my tone)

. Bullet points are my friend. It takes me a very long time to edit full on prose If I didn’t do bullet points I’d rarely get anything out. So, let’s run with that here

. The ability to randomize these points would be awesome. Ordering things make them feel like the order matters and it doesn’t really here. Maybe skim around and read them randomly to simulate the experience?

. Photography used to be my thing, but I haven’t taken a shot in a long time. Still love the idea of it and will probably get back to it at some point

. One day I’m going to get back to my Million Portrait Project (http://millionportraitproject.com/ - sorry for the “http without an s” link, but that site is old. Fixing that is on the list)

. Music is huge to me. Headphones are on most of the time. (I can totally recommend open-back ones if you haven’t tried them before, I got a very enjoyable pair of phillips for like $100)

. Doing projects and new stuff gives me the happy brain juice

. “Tuneify” is my current project. It’s an attempt to make a better robot DJ. A notoriously hard problem. I don’t expect to do anything surprising with it. I just want to see what happens if I implement the ideas in my head and learn more about how all that stuff works

. Learning is my jam, btw

. Tuneify will be here: https://www.alanwsmith.com/tuneify/ - but it’s far from even being a workable prototype. (It just loads your top songs into an IndexedDB when you log in. Unless I’ve broken it between the time I posted this and the time you see it which is likely given the dev process)

. Instead of listing about a bunch of projects I should just link to my links page https://links.alanwsmith.com which has a several of them

. Though, if you like The Shining, I’m really proud of: https://jacktorrance.blog

. On yeah, my main site is: https://www.alanwsmith.com - there’s like 1,800 completely unorganized posts on there. Still working on how I want to deal with that

. Part of dealing with it is that I wrote my own file format: https://www.alanwsmith.com/neopolitan/ and a static site generator to go with it. I’m tired of jumping frameworks, so my goal is to use this for the next 20 years

. Feels like I should mention I have bipolar 1, but I don’t really think about that very often. (I’m super lucky that my meds let me be functional)

. For 22 years, I worked at the PGA TOUR. I got burned out in general and after recovering from two years of major bipolar depression. Currently no gig. Still trying to figure out how I’m going to fit into the world

  • ekisM
    2•11 months ago

    I like Alan! He did an introduction, with his own post.

    What did you do for the PGA Tour? Was it software related?

    I’m pretty sure I have Bipolar 2, I get hypomanic, which drives people crazy, I sleep 2 hours and work 18 hours and am super social then I fall off the world and never talk to people. I’m trying to be better with it, force myself to take more walks when I’m in the depressive state. Having this illness 1 or 2 is a big part of your identity and I think its brave of you to share it.

    I’ve always wanted to create my own file format, I don’t have time to read into it yet but I absolutely will.

    I will have more questions for you Alan because I like you 🥰

    • @TheIdOfAlanOP
      2•11 months ago

      I originally worked on the website at the TOUR. I was the tech lead who coordinated work with our external teams. I also did a bunch of prototype stuff which is what I really enjoyed. Last few years there I was on the team who built a data analytics dept. That was fun during the build, but once it was up and running I wasn’t doing new stuff anymore and it turns out I need that in my life.

      I feel ya on the 2hrs sleep then 18 of making stuff as well as the crash afterwords. I didn’t get diagnosed until a few years back. I’d never had a full out manic episode until then. I went pretty far out though. Ran around my house naked for a week recording a podcast about how it was on me to become president and the modern day Shakespeare to save the world. Ended up in the psych ward for a few days, got the diagnosis and got on meds. I had a two year major depression after that and then a while recovering. Happy to report I’ve been stable since then.

      And, I’m digging you too 🕺 . Always love meeting folks who do things like start communities. That’s very cool

      • ekisM
        1•11 months ago

        It is a pleasure to meet you too, it has beeen really good for my mental health I think meeting so many interesting people in a short time.

        Hopefully I can keep dragging interesting artists, and other talents in here so when we decide on working together we have a variety of skills.

        Have you seen a starburst chart before? Its the style I like to visualize encryption keys actually to better use subkeys. I was thinking everyone interested in participating, people are free to lurk, we basically self access then overtime peer assessments would ideally make it more accurate. Because if we store like 3 of them, 1 that maps out skills, other one for things they would like to learn and another being their interests. I was hoping we could run small experiments on matching people up for lessons and having each do a peer review afterwards to develop learning tools that heavily involve people.

        I would like to teach more people, then obvio more people to help collaborate, but also so they don’t fall into one of those scams where its trade programming and they learn nothing about the system and write insecure and bad programs.

        it could also help match people to collaborate like LFG style possibly or just automatically find a task that could be completed with who is available.

        I need some Ruby programmers to help me fix Mastodon vanilla client, I could write the patch but I’m busy; but I have time to explain what needs to be done exactly and what patches need to be made. And I would be willing to take anyone wants to learn to porgram, and start teaching until you can write the patches. Its a pretty easy task I may just do it. I have to turn the /lib/* ActivityPub library into a Gem and then probably create a separate gem that uses a different activity pub server.

        Then there is always rewriting the jobs and getting rid of bloated sidekiq. Rails added jobs a while ago, literally no reason to have it.

        I think long as you are generally interested in the programming side of this project, and/or want to get into open source development. The concept of working under one banner at least on open source projects (for the time being) will provide a lot of benefits for us.