I actually enjoy when my browser crashes hard and forgets all of my open tabs that I‘ve been hoarding for weeks

I was never going to read that article or mess around with that code tool anyway

There’s got to be a lesson about living in the moment or something somewhere in there

 

I’ve spent months working on a blogging engine. I have always wanted to create my own ever since typing rails new blog in 2006.

I finally did it, and I realized I would still be better off using Hugo.

Oh well, lesson learned. At least I was finally able to scratch the itch.

 

I’ve been taking my oldest boy (14) to the gym lately. It’s been an absolute joy! He usually fights me on going, but by the end, he’s glad he went. It’s been a great time of bonding and sharing something that I’m passionate about with him. 💪

 

Beautiful sunny day today. The kids are in the yard playing soccer with their friends and I’m hacking code on the patio.

Definitely has summer vibes ☀️

 

Bosque

Since seeing a bobcat in The Bosque a few months ago, I now am constantly looking over my shoulder while I’m out there on my runs.

It’s both exciting and terrifying. 🏃‍♂️

#Fitness
 

“The world seems to be accustomed to delaying gratification less and less, which means the rewards of delaying gratification grow more and more.”

@JamesClear

 

My son’s friends discovered my blog and were talking about it to him (must have googled his last name).

Long story short, I’m pretty famous now.

 

Netlify Acquires Gatsby

Netlify Acquires Gatsby Inc. to Accelerate Adoption of Composable Web Architectures

It was only a matter of time. Do people even use Netlify for anything else?

 

My Year In Books 2022 📚

books

I have been super inspired by all of the posts this month about everyone’s “year in books”. I thought I was a pretty avid reading, but it turns out, I have a long way to go.

I had a pretty good mix of actually reading vs. listening to books last year. For the record, I’m a die hard Amazon Kindle fan (I know, not the best for authors, etc… but I just love the form fit. Also, I use Libby when possible to check books out from the library).

Here were the books I read in 2022:

Fiction

Non Fiction

(I’m definitely a self-help junkie)

If you got this far, I would love to hear your suggestion for books for me to reading in 2023.

#books
 

I recently wrote a post about using AI to filter social feeds.

It appears that the original founders of Instagram have a new startup that’s doing just that

I signed up for the beta and can’t wait to see what they come out with!

 

While demoing the shower in our rental house today, we discovered a “hidden” window that had been patched over.

We are going to open up the wall and restore it to its natural light letting in glory! 🏡

 

It’s not people’s job to show you what’s interesting or great about themselves. It’s your job to find it. This is life, not a sales convention. @iammarkmanson

Be genuinely curious about other people. Everyone is dying to share their stories, they just need a little coaxing.

 

I’ve read The King Killer Chronicles series by Patrick Rothfuss several times and LOVED it.

Can anyone recommend a similar series that I might enjoy? 📚

 

For this month’s retro game, I started playing The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening DX on my RG351V.

I absolutely LOVE this game and it looks gorgeous on this device.

I’ve played through most of Links Awakening on the original Gameboy hardware, however I never completed it due to the battery dying.

I’m excited to finally play it all the way through!

#retro-game-club
 

www.chronophoto.app

Chronophoto - The Photographical History Game

Who knew guessing the year a photo was taken could be so fun. As a comment on HN points out , this could be really cool as a daily challenge (a la Wordle) where everyone gets the same photos and competes.

 

How I missed out on being a crypto millionaire

Anyone who had participated in crypto for a significant amount of time, has a story or two about missed opportunity or even loss. This is my story.

In 2016, a client of mine asked me to build them a DApp (distributed app) on the Ethereum blockchain. At that time, ETH was trading around $100 USD per coin.

The client, being super into crypto, offered to pay me in Ethereum only. My consultancy was already doing fairly well at the time and I didn’t really need the money from the contract (around $100k USD). This would have amounted to me acquiring around 1,000 ETH. But, still being skeptical of crypto, I declined his offer and took the cash instead.

Huge mistake.

As many if your might know, at the crypto peak in 2022, Ethereum was trading at around $4,500 USD per coin.

Doing the math, that contract would now be worth over $4.5 million USD! 🤦‍♂️

I honestly don’t regret the decision to take the cash, as I now have a great story to tell. I love telling my kids and them telling me what a complete idiot I am.

I guess I’ll have to wait a little longer on buying the Lambo.

Do you have a crazy crypto story? I’d love to hear about it.

 

Currently reading: The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe by Richard Rohr 📚

#books:reading
 

It’s a beautiful sunny ☀️ day here in Albuquerque. Has me dreaming of warm summer days…

 

Reflections on the impact of the ‘4-Hour Workweek’ 15 years later

They had never read it. If they did, they would have found that it is a philosophical wake-up call disguised as a bunch of life hacks. The whole book is basically him channeling the energy of poet Mary Oliver and yelling, “Don’t waste your wild and precious life!”

When I read The 4 Hour Workweek in 2010, it had a profound impact on my life and trajectory.

Of course, I never believed I would work the literal 4 hour workweek, but the idea of questioning work and it’s role in my life was incredibly powerful.

I owe so much of my professional success today to Ferris and this book and it’s still relevant all of these years later.

 

Busy day: Work meetings. Multiple contractors at the rental. Driving kids around. Gym. Dinner with friends.

Wouldn’t have it any other way!

 

“People are rewarded in public for what they practice for years in private.” - Tony Robins

 

“How you do anything is how you do everything” -Martha Beck

I love this quote! It takes on a new meaning every time I hear it.

 

Trying to setup SSL for a wildcard subdomain using nginx and Certbot is proving more challenging than I anticipated.

My devops skills need some work.

 

(Another) Blogging Isn’t Dead Post

No, Blogging Is Not Dying Anytime Soon  - Darius Foroux

But still, people who read have always been in the minority. And I think that’s what most people who think that “video is the future” don’t get. Sure, people are getting lazier and they want you to feed them content.

But think about it. Do you really want to serve those types of people?!

I love “Blogging Is Not Dead” posts because I love to blog and often wonder if it’s a waste of time. It’s always reassuring to hear new perspectives on this topic and reaffirm the WHYs.

I had a wildly successful blog in the early 2000’s which I sold for almost nothing (I was a broke college kid and didn’t understand business) and have yet to recreate that sort of blogging success.

It’s helpful to recognize that these days that I probably won’t be a prominent blogger again but that doesn’t mean blogging can’t be an important part of my life.

I blog now for these reasons:

and I’m more than ok with that.

#blogging
 

Idea: ChatGPT For Filtering Social Media Feeds

While I was still using Twitter, I set up a ton of keyword filters. This was especially true during the election seasons. I prefer using social media to connect with people and find communities surrounding my hobbies and interests.

While these filters did an ok job, they often times had false positives and filtered out content that I was actually interested in. An example of this might be a filter on the word Trump. My intention was to remove posts around former president Trump as I really have no interest in such discussions. However, this might filter out something like this:

“I really feel that React trumps Angular in front-end web development”

Using keyword filtering, I would have missed out on an otherwise interesting conversation.

ChatGPT To The Rescue

Let’s say for example, that I want to only see posts about crypto and AI from my blog’s JSON feed. I could write a prompt like this:

const prompt  = `
Given the following JSON array of posts where the content key contains the 
HTML of the post:    
    
${JSON.stringify(content)}

filter out all posts that are about crypto or AI, and then return the JSON 
string containing the post id from the original post array.`

In this case the content is just structured JSON data of my blog. The returned result is

[{
	"id": "https://brandontreb.com/2023/01/23/p79q7wz6hlqmckertv2y9"
}, {
	"id": "https://brandontreb.com/2023/01/23/xh7qs5zhj69bbas75c63"
}, {
	"id": "https://brandontreb.com/2023/01/22/tfiettm6fumf0focwa8n0a"
}, {
	"id": "https://brandontreb.com/2023/01/21/6fd95o3q7ihqbqga6hp5e8"
}]

In this example, each of the posts are accurately classified as being about crypto or AI though they may or may not contain those keywords.

Using this method, we can now filter out social media feeds in much more interesting and dynamic ways. I could now say something like

“Don’t show me political discussions that are negative in nature”.

This way, I can still be a part of interesting conversations without risking my sanity.

I’m very interested and excited to explore this further and would love to hear your thoughts on it.

 
Brandon Trebitowski

💻 Software 🏕 Outdoors 🏠 Family 🏃‍♂️ Fitness