Sri Story Notes
My current daily activities are really quite boring. While I’m also doing more fun things like tending to my edible bee garden, the challenge for these stories is to help push through the tedium of adulting for creative independence.
Perhaps that’s the real focus of these stories, not the actual doing of boring things like writing a webserver.
Anyway, I’m continuing to play with the writing voice. I’m trying hard to write under a different persona, “A Cat named Sri”, that still feels grounded in my actual hoo-man self. Internally, I already model my internal world as being a kind of noisy cat, so emerging this persona publicly feels like way to make it more visible. I’m curious what that leads to!
The late afternoon sun had started to sink behind the pines when Sri the Cat noticed. She had been sitting in her patio food garden reading a chapter of The Kamogawa Food Detectives. She had needed the break from the tedium of doing her daily Adult Chores for Being a Creatively Independent Cat.
The chores themselves were relatively easy, and Sri understood how to do them. She even had the benefit of using an inexpensive Claude Pro account to look up details like, “what is the CSS that sets the box-sizing to the good model” and “how do I get the last 3 elements of an array as a new array?”, which she had forgotten after nearly a year away from coding. Despite her inherent disinterest in coding itself, it was the means to create Useful Things that she could share with The Universe. More specifically, she wanted to use these Useful Things as the foundation for her true interest in attracting humane uses of technology so more people could share their joys of whatever on the Internet of Good Things. The Internet, in Sri’s estimation, had been becoming notably less good over the past 7 years and this was highly upsetting.
“What was the direct path to good anyway?” Sri mumbled to herself upon entering her office. She looked over the accomplishments of the day so far:
- She had added a new category to her public notebook website called toolshed rather than workshop, as the half-baked experiments in that category were not glorious enough to be part of a fancy research workshop. Most of the stuff in there was fragments of junk that still needed to come together.
- Then she had dickered around with the atom feed XSL, code wasn’t even going to be supported in a few years, because she simply wanted a nicer-looking atom feed. Aesthetics were very important to Sri.
- Then she had investigated fixing the last updated entries indexer, so she could put either “UPDATED” or “NEW” in an additional Everything That’s Changed atom feed. This had proven to be more of a refactor than she wanted to get into, but she’d spent the time anyway thinking it over.
All of these were incremental improvements that were completely unrelated to Sri’s actual goals of writing a story about her work for the day. Harrumph!
Sri defiantly performed another non-writing task instead of writing anything:
- Paragraphs on now followed book-like paragraph spacing instead of the default blog style that Sri usually used on information pages.
This looked suspiciously like progress. Though, the actual task of the day was something else entirely:
Deno Server delivers webapp bundle!
This was what Sri was supposed to be building, and the sun had already started to set. Sri checked her watch and it was already 6:00PM! But she’d already used up her “technical focus energy” for the day! Or had she? Maybe the resistance was just her Lizard Brain trying to trick her into giving up. This seemed likely, given the lizard’s underhanded ways of sapping her enthusiasm with endless complaints about effort being effortful wah wah wah.
Maybe a short 23-minute nap would restore that energy. It was worth a shot.
Surprisingly, the nap worked. Sri had closed her eyes and observed all the rowdy thoughts colliding with each other, resisting the urge to scroll something on the phone for distraction and sat with them. They were disjointed howls demanding attention and stimulation, clamboring for immediate gratification. But after about 5 minutes, Sri had fallen asleep to be awakened later by the alarm. 23 minutes had been just enough. Now to test whether enough mental clarity had been achieved to at least start the Boring Task of the Day. It was now 7:17PM.
Mini Technical Brief
- hardcode a site path called DOCROOT
- serve static files from the DOCROOT based on [app] and [identity]
This was the crudest possible thing to do. Sri trusted that once this was in place, then her architect’s instinct would kick-in to generalize the solution.
A hurdle presented itself almost immediately: there was no Deno-native version of the File Systems Operations module. The current one was also written in Javascript, not Typescript. So, Sri bit the bullet and rewrote it with the help of Claude Code to look-up type syntax that Sri had last used a year ago, and also to find the Deno equivalents of Node’s file system calls. It too two hours, but the result looked clean. This was progress in the small!
Tomorrow would see the continuation of the Mini Technical Brief. It was time to snooze.
Sri is So Boooored
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