Arch = solid, first feature = amazin, inspo = 1000
July wrap-up building Batchbrew ??
I forgot to turn on my local dev server for a whole week ?? simply didn’t notice I was working on the Batchbrew App without the server being up. That was a very irritating moment where I was briefly baffled by how I was able to build the UX like that, and it took me two or three seconds to comprehend “oh sheesh, so THIS is what an offline first architecture feels like” ????
Topics covered: bringing BB's foundational architecture to live ????, leveraging my tech stack to drive the first BB feature ??, what does "meaning" actually mean ?? and inspo from the music industry ??
Architecture doing the heavy lifting
I had similar realisations coming up as I saw the BB UX coming to life on the desktop and mobile apps. Stuff “just works” because I was right in investing the time into a solid foundation, which abstracts away all the state management, cross device data syncing and offline-availability. Combined with just a few features, BB already feels pretty slick to use.
The cool (and scary) part about that is that the abstraction layers I completed this month power all of the features. Cool, because if one works all work. Scary, because if one fails, all fail.
ok getting more tangible: I’ve abstracted every piece of content (eg a paragraph, header, pic, ..) as a “block”, inspired by Notion’s block model. So when I implement the feature “create a block” there is a more complicated abstract part to it, which I implement once - and once that works, it works for all types of blocks. And then there is a concrete implementation to it, which I have to implement per block type (eg “create a text block” or “create a page block”). But thanks to my architecture style, that is a matter of minutes. I used similar patterns for updating, deleting, and syncing blocks, which turns out to be a decent dev speed up - both because the required overhead to integrate new blocks is relatively small and because maintenance overhead is reduced to the abstraction layers.
Using BB’s first (and for now single) feature for the first time
On top of the foundational data handling and state management on the app side, I’ve added the first and only feature for the upcoming V1 release: curating Lists of links (I call them “Journeys”) ????
Getting BB’s UX working and using this feature live also helped me to realise more of the potential of BB. It just feels perfect for storing all kinds of inspiration, correlating it to a real-life problem I want to solve with it, and knowing that I securely stored it for diving deeper into it or for putting the gained knowledge to use. A few moths ago I was unsure about how BB and Notion will compete, but now I see more and more that they don’t: I still love using Notion for more static content / project planning / docs, but BB is simply winning when it comes to living, breathing documents that are meant to encapsulate evolving ideas.
The space I created fuelled my curiosity to dive into artists who inspire me. Although getting external content into BB is on the roadmap for August, I can see how BB is the pain killer for my endlessly growing watch-later and read-later lists, which seem to generate zero advancement for my individual growth as a human being.
Speaking of inspo..
I’ve watched more of David Choe, particularly how limiting options can make us more creative and how we can express feelings through art and let stuff happen. It inspired me in my own art to simply invite whatever wants to get on the canvas, without needing it to mean anything. Interestingly it turned out that the meaning appeared in the practice, and the artwork was just the cherry on top, but not important really ????
I realised through my meditations in the past weeks similar truths. Asking “how is life meaningful?” or “what’s a happy life?” requires the mind to come up with a story - the same as asking “what does this artwork represent, and how is it meaningful?”. It's not. It's a random constellation of black ink on white paper and I felt a lot of joy doing it and that's it. You see? Completely useless indeed. Maybe. But the creation felt profound to me, and there's no need to justify why it felt that way. Throughout the past months I found the stories my logical mind created around these questions to be increasingly misleading. Can't I just do this because I feel so amazing while doing it? Why does it need to mean anything? Isn't this "enuf"?
Same holds for BB: I mean, I see where it can lead, I know that eventually I take responsibility for mine and our user's data, and that my and my future team mates' income depends on it. But what's at the root? Pure amazement. I just love doing this, I love how the product reveals itself to me and to discover all the twists and turns on the journey. I remember back last year when I had to look for an argumentation to justify my efforts until realising that the story about BB, my art, my workouts - the heck, about my whole life - distracts always from my experience. But taking my raw fascination as fuel, following it and letting my mind figure out the details about how to make it happen is a much more joyful way of creation.
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But what are thoughts then? ??
I encountered more heavy, drowning thinking in the beginning of the month and then had to ask myself what all those stories and concepts are useful for. I dove into the nature of thought. Sometimes hard to not get entangled, but it’s fair to say that the experiences I collected this year have equipped me with the right mind-tools to navigate my mind into and out of “the jungle of thought” ?????? A sentence that keeps resonating with me from the Tao te Ching is “Know the white, keep to the black” - which I experience now as synonymous to “know thought and story for what it is, keep rooted int the all-surrounding space in which all of it arises”.
I find that the mind just creates friction that swirls up a perfect flow whenever identification happens. In stillness, I perceive thoughts as “things” offered in the mind’s space (well, they need some space to exist, which I label creatively as “mind-space”) to be either used (=thought) or dismissed (=forgotten). The wicked part is the stickiness / relevance that the mind sometimes creates towards a thoughts, based on the stories and context I give to the thought. If a thought seems relevant based on whatever argumentation, it grows and grabs more of my attention.
Fine, to keep this post in scope I gotta hold back myself here for now ..back to the inspo vibes ??
I grow a lot by listening to other’s people ideas
Other than David Choe, I saw some interview of Four Tet and Aphex Twin whose music inspires me a lot to the extent that I will some day of my future music career imitate more of what they do. They talk mostly about focusing on the work that needs to be done and their creative process.
Also impressed by Flumes inpso based off J Dilla for beat design and I discovered (and subscribed to) Colugo who's building a new DAW (Blockhead DAW) from scratch. Playing around with it, as I don’t have access to a piano rn and it's pretty fun. Also inspiring to see some fellow engineer trying to launch their own product.
ok. Design! I just love the design of Teenage Engineering, just look at their products ?? - I’m for sure drawing in their design language into my own artworks, and let’s see maybe it even resonates with the upcoming BB UI. It’s another perfect example for what I would store in my BB space in my “Visual Design Journey”, so that I could come back to it when I'll have to solve future product design challenges.
Body practice ????
If you’ve been following along you know that my body-mind connection has a quite high importance on my day-to-day. So this month I mastered Skin the Cat to Muscle Up transitions, and was able to get more stable in free-standing HS. Here is the lowest quality screenshot I was able to make from the videos that I usually just use to fix my form:
Grateful for
Thank you for reading, it's great having you here ?? and see ya'll next month ????
Article originally published on my public progress page: https://join.batchbrew.xyz/p/dd-27a9ab93-0901-499e-8031-645992e3d43a
Learn more about Batchbrew: https://batchbrew.xyz/
Read my blog (the other one): https://medium.com/@giorgiogross