Andrew WatsonAndrew Watson
awwsmm.com / projects / awwsmm.com / 2023-05-07

awwsmm.com

  • Slow and Steady Wins The Race
    Incremental Progress, No Matter How Slow, Is Better Than No Progress At All

    Recent Changes

    There's a big gap in the commit history for this website.

    On March 17, 2022, I added a new blog post. You can read the post, titled "Elegant Multi-Line Shell Strings", here if you like.

    Then, I made no changes for almost an entire year. I merged two dependency updates in January 2023 and February 2023. The next substantial changes I made were on March 3, 2023, where I bumped a few dependencies and rewrote a bit of the codebase which had always bothered me / felt a bit clunky to me.

    Over the past two months, though, I've been on a roll. I

    I also organized my to-do list, crossing off lots of small things which had been sitting there for a while, like

    ...not to mention all of the small quality-of-life development fixes I've added: restructuring the code for ease of maintenance, upgrading dependencies, clarifying docs, and just generally making my development workflow a lot easier. (I've still got a lot to do, but I'm making good progress.)

    I then ported over some old blog posts from my Dev.To blog to test the new Markdown rendering and CSS I added, and to have some data for Vercel analytics. These are some of the posts I'm most proud of, including

    Finally, I also added social buttons to the bottom of blog posts to make them easier to share, and set log entries on project pages to collapse when they're at the bottom of the project update history, because I've now got too many commits and my last log entry for awwsmm.com is all the way at the bottom of the page -- the victim of my own productivity.

    Roadblocks

    March 2022 to March 2023 was a busy time for me. I left my job, moved out of Ireland, got married, went on a two-month honeymoon road trip around the U.S., moved to Canada, started a new job, and survived my first Canadian winter. It's only now that I'm really starting to recover from all of that, and starting to have a good chunk of time to work on my website again.

    But that being said, before all of those big life changes happened, I had set the bar very high for myself to keep this website up to date. It was definitely over-engineered. Cleaning up the confusing stuff, removing roadblocks, and making the path to developing and writing straighter and smoother have led to a huge number of improvements over the past few months.

    I hope to keep that momentum going with more log entries, blog posts, and project updates in the coming months. Stay tuned!

awwsmm.com / projects / awwsmm.com / 2023-05-07