Self Prompting

Like many folks out there, I too did not have the courage or motivation to maintain a personal blog. It seemed like a lot of effort that my anxious psyche would be unable to withstand. I’m well acquainted with the merciless and thriving critic within me—I don’t need external ones making themselves known.

But, after my friend Anna Hope sent me Affirmations for bloggers by Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya, I have been successfully inspired to start a blog regardless. The affirmations and prompts within convinced me that I can (and should) share my mind with others.

For my first substantial post, I’m going to use these prompts to generate ideas for future entries. I hope to inspire confidence in myself and others to do the same.

Let’s start by reminding ourselves of a few affirmations suggested by Nicole.

“You have things to write about. Your perspective matters. You are good enough.”

The Prompts

The following prompts all come from the first affirmation, ”You have things to write about.”

What’s something you learned recently?

I’m learning how to use LangChain to build LLM agent applications. It’s thrilling to be working with new tools for new problems, but there aren’t enough complex examples for study yet. This video from LangChain and related GitHub repo are exceptions and have helped me to better understand emerging design patterns.

What’s a thing you’ve done?

Earlier this year, I found myself frustrated with options for Supabase background jobs and thought:

“I just want n docker containers to subscribe to a table and churn through pending jobs in a queue.”

So I built and released supaworker-js to ease that frustration. Currently, there is only a TypeScript client, but I really want to write one in Rust as well.

Did you have any conversations/debates recently?

I had a conversation with Anna on the state of modern technical interviews. It felt easy to agree on the problems, but during the discussion my mind was changed on what was the best way to solve them. There’s a lot to this one and want to be thoughtful before sharing as there are more perspectives I should learn about and cultivate.

What did you do this week?

I built this blog using this Joy of Code post and related GitHub repo as the foundation. It’s a prerendered SvelteKit application that uses a library called mdsvex to enable writing posts in markdown.

What do you wonder about?

I wonder about the ways software engineers can have positive impacts on their local and remote communities.

I wonder about writing software in a future with fewer resources.

Bonus Prompts

In addition, I’d like to include a few prompts of my own to respond to.

What books are you reading?

I read a ton of content: news, code, papers, social media, blogs and essays, and never enough books.

Here are two I’m currently juggling:

What art is moving you?

We have access to more art than ever before in human history and we allow precious few to change us forever.

Here are two albums I keep rotating:

📻 Meanwhile by aivi & surasshu
📻 Fantasy by M83

I’ve never been here before!

This one is a bit different and isn’t for blogging—it’s for practicing mindfulness. Act as if you have never been here before. What do your senses tell you about the present moment?

Thanks to Anna Hope for reviewing an early draft of this post.