Sometimes I debate wether I should write about work, or how it feels to work. I face the same issue on my personal journal when I try to discern between what happened vs how I feel about what happened. The answer is straightforward only in appearance (well, write both duh!), but these are two perspectives which cannot be seen at the same time, that would be like trying to see the font and the back of a human head at the same time.
This is because we go through two different realities: objective experience and subjective experience. When I work, there’s work that happens in the object (Blank Page and work that happens inside me as I work on the object.
Inner work only seems to happen when it involves creative work, that is work that is not rote, that involves a certain degree of challenge, and involves some emotional investment. This kind of work transforms us inside out while objective work transforms us outside in.
I accidentally wandered into a meta reflection which I didn’t intend to do at this moment, because I’m short on time for my yoga class.
Well, I went to my yoga class and then I came back to find what I wrote, and I see the dichotomy is not what I made it out to be. Front and back, inside and outside, above and below are all connected. I experience feelings because it there was stimulus from the material world. I will write about some of the things I did, and how they made me feel.
I was struggling to get data from an html form into parameters I could pass to OpenAI’s API, because the API expects integers and when you pass data through a form, everything gets converted into a string.
I had a moment of hopelessness: all of web development is like this, everything is duck-taped together and you need to account for ten thousand quirks in order to get any amount of work done. How am I supposed to ever find flow, if every task is a minefield of gotchas and edge cases. It’s like wanting to run blindfolded through a thick forest.
But then I found out the workaround: you convert data from the form into a single string, and then you parse the string as JSON on the server-side, of course! And soon enough I was getting interesting stories generated by GPT-3 populating Blank Page.
So that’s the pendulum of web work, which swings between despair and ecstasy. Perhaps web work attracts they kind of people who find the roller coaster ride thrilling, because most people find the frustration overwhelming to the point when they actually get things to work they find no satisfaction, they are drained. I’ve often told people who want to get into the industry: try it out a couple of weeks, don’t be too ambitious. You will face ten thousand problems, if you find yourself engaged instead of frustrated, then web (or computer) work is for you.
I sent a celebratory email to René in the afternoon, and he replied in the morning with a screenshot which indicated Staging was down and he couldn’t see the work I had done. Sigh. Time to figure out what’s wrong.