March 11, 2022

Life Update - February

My most productive month this far. Quite a busy one too, but not as stressful as the previous months.

Rust

This month I finished both the Rustlings and the Rust Book. After these two I feel confident enough to start building my first Rust project.

Rustlings got really hard for me in the end. I smashed the first ~50 rustlings, but after that I actually had to look for the answers to a few of the problems. I did really enjoy this way of learning though. You open a file and fix it according to the error messages either from the compiler or the tests. I hope that every language would have materials like this.

The Rust book got also quite complicated during the last chapters and I feel like I will get more out of those after a year or two of writing Rust code.

Overall I found that error handling and threads were the hardest topics for me. Lifetimes and ownership were not as hard as I thought them to be. Maybe it is because I don't have such a strong background with Object Oriented languages like Java or C++.

Reflections after one month with Obsidian

I tried Obsidian for one month and I actually liked it quite a lot. It is probably one of the best note-taking applications I have used this far. It was really close that I would have stayed with it, but I was not quite able to create the workflow I want to with it so I migrated back to Neovim.

I hoped that I would have gotten a easy one-click way of exporting my notes to pdf with Obsidian, but I was not able to create the pdf-styling I needed to with Obsidian. I went back to Pandoc for the creation of pdf-files with custom styling. I need to create different style of styling for different uses and I have not found any other solution for this than Pandoc.

I also tried to create a new note-taking workflow that works inside Obsidian, but it did not suite my thinking workflow like the Vim workflow does. I guess I could have given Obsidian more time and try tweaking the workflow more to fit my thinking, but my Vim setup works already so why make things complicated?

I was also really hopeful for the Mermaid-diagrams and images in the notes, but ended up not using them at all during the month so that was a bummer. I guess here again more time could have made a difference, but why try to force something when you already have a working workflow.

I'm one of those persons that ends up using more time setting up a productive workflow than actually being productive and Obsidian really supports that (as does Vim of course). That is why in the end I migrated back to Vim, because there I already have the optimal workflow that just works and I'm not using too much time tinkering with it anymore, but I'm actually being productive.

Closing thoughts

This was a bit uneventful month compared to the previous ones. I was just grinding through all the bridge studies and course work that I needed to get done in school while also trying to learn Rust and get ready for the coming deep learning & NLP courses in school.

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