Jay Parry

old.jayparry.dev

Mon, 11 Mar 2024 13:08:06 GMT

I don’t know what exactly it is about it, but I don’t like my old portfolio website.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud of what I was able to build, especially while learning to build with Astro.

Maybe it’s just some lingering imposter syndrome, but I don’t know - something about it feels off to me. The best way I can describe it is that it feels like something that’s pretending to be a website.

Maybe it’s the design / the colour palette?
Maybe it’s that one obscure bug with the header I could never really resolve (the one that forces my code snippets to have a max line width otherwise the header unexpectedly stretches horizontally and squashes vertically).

The only thing I really like about it is the blog post tagging / filtering system I built (which I should definitely rebuild for this version – unless you’re reading this in the future and I’ve already done it, then you can just ignore this paragraph).

Either way, I rebuilt it, and that’s why this website now exists.

There’s still plenty of work left to do with this version, but I’m much happier with it.

Anyway, ramble over. Goodbye for now!

your mind is for having ideas, not holding them

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 10:04:32 GMT

Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them
– David Allen

I'm not sure where, but I recently came across this quote. I forgot about it for a while, but it resurfaced to the forefront of my mind today.

After doing some digging, searching what I vaguely remembered the quote to be, I discovered that the original is attributed to David Allen, a "productivity consultant", as noted on Wikipedia.

While my views on productivity, self-improvement, and hustle culture may lean more towards the pessimistic side (a discussion for another day), I've actually found this simple sentence from David to be incredibly valuable.

Most of the stress, frustration, and scatteredness don’t necessarily come from having so much to do but from trying to store all of it inside the mind.

Lately, I can't think of a single thing that I relate with more than this excerpt.

Now, let me go on a tangent for a moment (I promise it's relevant). While this is almost certainly a me problem, I've always ended up trying to over-engineer "the perfect productivity system" whenever I've gone down that path. I've spent hours configuring dashboards in Notion, trying to create habit tracking systems, project management systems, you name it. The problem is trying to get them to stick.

The annoyingly simple solution that works for me? Carrying a notepad and pen around in my pocket.

The act of scrawling a few words, barely legible to anyone but me, works perfectly for my brain. It allows me to offload my thoughts without sliding down slippery slope of "can this be better?" and veering towards over-engineering another system, ultimately just wasting time.

I can hear you asking, "What about the notes app on your phone?"
Yeah look, I don't know either. I think the fact that the notebook serves a single purpose – scrawling something down and immediately moving on – offers a better experience than the one given to me by my phone.

Sure, my phone has a notes app, but it also has access to all of human knowledge in there, and sometimes I find that a little distracting.

sorting tailwindcss classes in an astro project with vs code

Sat, 23 Dec 2023 03:13:21 GMT

Installation

npm i --save-dev prettier-plugin-astro prettier-plugin-tailwindcss

(or by running the equivalent command for the package manager of your choice).

My Prettier Config

.prettierrc.mjs

/** @type {import("prettier").Config} */
export default {
  useTabs: true,
  singleAttributePerLine: true,
  plugins: ["prettier-plugin-astro", "prettier-plugin-tailwindcss"],
  overrides: [
    {
      files: "*.astro",
      options: {
        parser: "astro",
      },
    },
  ],
};

NOTE: The plugin order matters. Ensure that the prettier-plugin-tailwindcss is loaded after the prettier-plugin-astro.

VS Code Settings

"prettier.documentSelectors": ["**/*.astro"],
  "[astro]": {
    "editor.defaultFormatter": "esbenp.prettier-vscode"
  },

Press Ctrl + Shift + P (Cmd + Shift + P on mac), and search for user settings, selecting Preferences: Open User Settings (JSON).