I simply like how I have small but not insignificant pockets of time throughout the whole working week. I'm not cutting away from family time. I just hop on a train, find a place to sit, turn on Honeyworks or other kind of music I have for work and write code till I get to my destination. I must pay attention when I go home because I almost missed my stop a few times.

On the other hand, I have just the time on my commute. Maybe a little when I'm at home or on weekends. There's no 5 more minutes. Well, there is when Czech Railways f*** up. So, I get 40 minutes on a train because it's broken, there are catenary wires torn apart, signals misbehave or hay, cows, cars, police officers are on tracks and various other more or less weird stuff happens. With Czech railways one never knows. But mostly it's 20 minutes. I have to start and finish before it ends. When I'm not done, I have another go at it next time.

Having these frequent time windows enables me to keep mental models in my head. It's easier to start and continue where I left off. Like the middle of the previous sentence. But most importantly I can't just say: F*** it and scroll reddit for next 30 minutes. Because mobile internet is not that good and why would I do it?

The most interesting thing about this time boxing stuff is how much I can do. This is my second blog post in 2 months. I'd say it's the same amount of blog posts that I've been able to write in the previous 10 years. I'm too lazy to check the wayback machine if I'm right or not. But it's damn close. And on top of that I've made a little utility which might be interesting for more people than just me. Well, I need to release it. Soon®

So next time you want to make sure you do something, make a calendar event for it. Or do it on your daily commute. But make sure your lazy ass doesn't get in your way. Maybe get an accountability buddy but you need a buddy for that. So maybe move to the Czech Republic where you could commute by train and enjoy the chaos that is Czech Railways. You never know. Maybe you'll have a whole hour of work done on a 20 minute commute.

Well something like this happened to me few times before. I worked on some useless stuff before. So don't pity me too much. I've gained some knowledge but that's about it. It also happened to my blog. I've had the idea of having a blog for 3+ years now. I've wanted my place on the internet. Something I wouldn't have to worry about some big ass CFO deciding that I need to pay much more to stay on the platform. Or wiping the platform off the internet entirely. So I wrote the blog in Elixir using Phoenix live view. It's almost finished. There's admin with markdown editor, SEO descriptions, image uploads, site maps, RSS even front-end. But it's not online because life happened.

Life happened in such a way that I think the project will not be finished in next 2 months for sure. When I say 2 months it might mean 2 years. You never know. So what am I supposed to do? Well write stuff on commute to and from my day job and hopefully have a blog before shipping the code. I'm grateful we have world class public transport where I live. You might be too if you get orange pilled.

I already can anticipate questions about open-sourcing the code. TLDR: No.

Long answer: Hell no! I already have little time. Wasting it on open-sourcing a blog which most probably will never go anywhere is not what I'm looking for. It takes roughly time to write docs and stuff for OSS version. Ain't nobody got time for that! I have better things to do.

So now I have this almost bare static HTML that resembles a blog. All of it generated from markdown I've written in obsidian. But I don't care, I ship it! Beauty of raw HTML is how it works on everything from phone to a 8k monitor. But for those snobs with 4k and more I had to make text not take up all screen. Even archiving it on wayback machine will be easy.

Hopefully see you in the future!