DEV Community: Tony S.

What I Can Learn from Luffy’s Adventures

Tony S. — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 17:13:29 +0000

If you don’t know (seriously?), Luffy is the main character of Manga/Anime One Piece. It’s about his journey to search the greatest treasure in the world, One Piece. He wants to be a pirate king, and in his journey, he met some friends to go along on his journey.

Me? I am a web developer, still shaping my career here and there. So what I can learn from Luffy? Of course, it’s not the gomu-gomu thing. Or become a pirate, even though looks like fun.

For the last, maybe, 6 months I started One Piece marathon. I watched it from Fishman Island Arc until now Land of Wano Arc (shit, now I have to wait to watch the next episode). Every arc has something in common. At the critical moment, there will be someone to help him or his friends. Help from anyone, even from the enemy. Let’s take an example :

The dugong, help Luffy and Law from Pet Pet fruit eater. Luffy met Dugong and fight him and become their master at Arabasta.
Wadatsumi, help Thousands Sunny escape from Big Mom. Wadatsumi was a bad guy at Fishman Island Arc.
Mr. 2 (my favorite), help Luffy escape from Impel Down. Even he sacrifices himself to let Luffy go, and remember how he encourages Luffy to get better after got poison from Magellan. T_T. Mr. 2 was a bad guy from Baroque Works.
Vinsmokes, they help Luffy from Big Mom. Vinsmokes are Sanji’s family.

Watching One Piece makes my mind-blowing sometimes. Everything connected.

How I can relate this to my career? I am doing this web developing things from 2011 until now I have met many people and have worked with some companies. Sometimes I didn’t realize that what I did some years before will affect the present.

Let’s take an example.

Around 2013 I joined a digital agency and that company is using Foundation as their CSS framework. At that time I just knew Bootstrap, Bootstrap is everything. Inside of me insist why should I use Foundation, Bootstrap is more in here and there. But I continue using Foundation. Later I joined my next company, I am still I am using Foundation. Foundation is my number one CSS framework.

TL;DR

I got my first remote job. I worked for a Malaysian company. Someday, there is a chance to meet another team member in Malaysia. And we talked a lot. That time I discovered that I got the job because I mentioned I am using Foundation, not my skills. At least the boss, interested in me because of Foundation. There is some dude who has better skill than me.

That brings me back to 2013. Let say I give up, and still insist on using Bootstrap at that time, maybe I am now still working in Jakarta, struggling with traffic.

See where I am going with this?

Whatever are you doing right now, even the small one, just do it with pride. We don’t know what it will bring in the future. And be nice to people, we don’t know what the purpose of that we know some dude in our life in the future. There no such things as coincidence.

If you don’t get what I am talking about, Pandji has a better explanation.

Procrastination

Tony S. — Wed, 03 May 2023 02:39:05 +0000

This month maybe is the worst condition of my work life balance. I wake up tired, after 5 PM my eyes will be heavy and have no interest of doing things. Feel so busy but in the other hand nothing on the to-do list was checked.

My tasks keep flying in my mind, but I just walking around it and avoid it by doing something else. I kept ask my future me to do the tasks. When I want to start doing it, my mind and body already tired and boom I just fell a slept. Repeat that for the next day.

I think I am just a lazy mf, until I watched a video from Matt D’Avella, “Why you always feel so mentally drained”.

We made +/- 35.000 decisions everyday. That’s a fuckin’ lot. That’s lead to decision fatigue. All tasks will be feel like so difficult to tackle, even a simple bug or changing font color will be feel so difficult. Too lazy to think about it. Even worst we don’t know what to do next, so we do nothing.

Decision avoidance can keep us stuck to in a state of analysis-paralysis and stop us from taking action on the important things.

Knowing what my problem is is the beginning. So I re-prioritize my day and try to reduce the number of decisions I have to make. I took too many side jobs at the same time, yeah I know, please don’t judge me. So I filtered them and try to say no to some of them.

A magic happened, my task that sat for several weeks on my to-do list was checked in just a few hours. The task actually not so difficult. Maybe the story point is just 5, I thought it was 34.

My mind is clearer now just like Saitama’s head.

Hey World inspired WordPress theme

Tony S. — Fri, 19 Nov 2021 01:40:21 +0000

I have been a fan of Basecamp for a long time. I have been using it for almost 3 years when I worked in a digital agency. And following the founder Jason Fried and DHH on Twitter for quite some time. Besides the controversy that they made recently, I still love their products, eg: Basecamp, Hey, books, even though I do not buy/subscribe to it all, but they inspired me in a way.

After they launch Hey, it's an email service with a focus on privacy (I love the app), they launched Hey World. It's a blogging platform that the content comes from email. No bullshit, just send an email and blast off, your content goes to the internet. As DHH said, we need back to web 1.0.

My take on this is "simplified everything". We live in a world that everything is an app. In my job, there's a ton of app that does this and that. My job is web-related, so WordPress and friends will be my daily date. I have a personal site, the last update is more than a year, one post a year is already good. So the idea of Hey World is really answering my problem.

So why not create my own Hey World?

I have many blogging platforms WordPress, NuxtJS, NextJS, Ghost. But none of them are active. So I try back to my root which is WordPress. So I create a theme that looks like Hey World. I create it using underscores_ and Tailwind CSS. I stripped unneeded features from underscores, just need the essential. Here is the theme in case you interested, hey-world. Now my website already looks like Hey World, of course already adjusted to my need.

Now the key part, send an email to publish a post. WordPress by default already has this option, but somehow there is a simple alternative by Jetpack, which is more than enough to achieve my goal.

So far, I am quite happy with the result.

Original post: https://tony.sanjaya.info/hey-world/