Last Thursday, I had an idea I was surprised I hadn’t had before. The idea was could I replace my iPhone with an Apple Watch? I already own the SE model Apple ⌚️, and I find my iPhone to be extremely distracting to keep around. I especially get sucked into apps that deliver content you don’t ask for and loath anything that resembles reels, tiktoks, or YouTube stories. I just can’t stand those kinds of apps and how they suck you in. Kind of hard to do on a ⌚️ screen though! Right!?

I’m not sure why this didn’t dawn on me earlier, but when it did, I set out to use just my ⌚️ for the weekend (plus Thursday & Friday) as a test.

….And…. I can’t just get rid of my iPhone, namely because of these main issues I found during my four day experiment:

• Can’t Google things on-the-fly on a ⌚️
• Banking not really possible on a ⌚️
• Some apps just don’t work on a ⌚️ or on a 💻
• Can’t tweet on the go!
• Can’t take a picture of a thing on a ⌚️
• Can’t edit calendar entries on the go!
• Can’t read books (audiobooks are great) on a ⌚️
• Can’t setup your ⌚️ or configure it w/out a 📱 anyways

..and probably many more I can’t remember right now.

These are things I could live without if I had to, but it just wouldn’t be worth it. But, having to keep my phone in my pocked for four days helped me learn that most of the things I do on my 📱 I can do on my :watch:, like:

• Audiobooks
• Note-taking (Voice Memos)
• Messaging
• Calling
• Music
• Reminders
• Set timers
• View my account balances (some banking)
• Pay for things (Apple Pay/Starbucks)
• Two-factor Authenticate
• Even look things up on Yelp

…and so, even though I can’t just sell my iPhone and use my Apple Watch 100% of the time I did learn I could probably use my ⌚️ 80% of the time to do most things. And so 80% of the time I’m at home my phone will likely live in my office or bedroom and I will just keep my ⌚️ on me. If I need to Google something, I’ll go get it. My 📱 will likely go with me when I’m out and about though, but for most things (including navigation, music, podcasts, etc) I’m just going to keep it in my pocket and try do do as much with my ⌚️ as I can.

I might even invest in a cellular version of my ⌚️ so I can leave it at home when I’m out and about and I know I won’t have to e.g. do some banking or something (e.g. I’m out hiking, walking, or something). I want to use my ⌚️ more, and I think that’s worth failing at this experiment!

But… I still think the ⌚️ is going to eventually become the new 📱 (e.g. you won’t have a 📱, you’ll just have a ⌚️)…but that’s a little farther in the future.

The idea below is a tool I use to help me valuate my judgements of things using the Discipline of Desire formatted into a scoring system. I just write something down, score it, compare it to other things on my list.

It uses 4 points to measure:

• Excellence in Character: Are you doing the right thing?
• Social Value: Does everyone enjoy it?
• Helpfulness: Does it help along your path towards an excellent character?
• Naturalness: Is this something found regularly in nature, or is it un-natural?

It’s not perfect, but it’s quick and mostly in-line with the Discipline of Desire.

Below you will see kindness, above all, is most valuable (especially your own), good weather is only slightly preferred over bad weather, and racism is strongly in the negative, mostly because it’s also un-natural, for example, compared to stealing.

It’s just a helpful (and quick) mechanism that helps me put my value of things into a easy to call-upon system.

The Point System

• Excellence (virtue)
  • It is excellent character +1
  • It is not excellent character -1
  • Not an act of character 0
• Nature (universal harmony)
  • Natural +1
  • Un-natural -1
• Socially Valueable (it serves everyone)
  • Socially valuable +1
  • Socially invaluable -1
  • Socially neutural 0
• Helpfulness (indifference)
  • Helpful to excellent character +1
  • Unhelpful towards excellent character -1
  • Neutural effect on excellent character 0

Examples

Kindness +4

• It is excellent character +1
• Socially valuable +1
• Helpful to excellent character +1
• Natural +1

Kindness (from others) +3

• Not an act of (your) character 0
• Socially valuable +1
• Helpful to excellent character +1
• Natural +1

*Yes, I chose to place kindness (from others) as helpful towards developing good character (preferred), but out own kindness is obviously more important!

Sex +2

• Not an act of character 0
• Socially valuable +1
• Neutural effect on excellent character 0
• Natural +1

Good Weather +2

• Not an act of character 0
• Socially valuable +1
• Neutural effect on excellent character 0
• Natural +1

Bad Weather +1

• Not an act of character 0
• Socially invaluable -1
• Helpful to excellent character +1
• Natural +1

Stealing -2

• It is not excellent character -1
• Socially invaluable -1
• Unhelpful towards excellent character -1
• Natural +1

*Note, the reason stealing can be seen as natural, is because even in the animal kingdom stealing happens normally.

Racism -4

• It is not excellent character -1
• Socially invaluable -1
• Unhelpful towards excellent character -1
• Un-natural -1

*Note, here, how racisim, though, is un-natural, as it is not something seen elsewhere in nature

In 2020 @WebDevStudios set an engineering goal:

to be the best damn Gutenberg shop out there!

…and we are. I am a little late in this training and so, this document will be the final document I will hand over to our Directory of Engineering.

Format

Random jibberish and note-taking as I go. Yeah, sorry Greg. But I will be taking random notes here (mostly gibberish) as I go along.

What I did first

I built one of the three blocks: this one.

I already watched the videos/did the courses. But I didn’t build anything. And I just wanted to level up quickly and hack my way through the first block of the three we were asked to do.

Things I learned:

• Not really hard to build a simple block
• Got really lost because my block wasn’t really designed to save anything, but figured it out
• Probably could have done this better, so don’t judge the final result, hopefully the next 2 are better

Now what…

Now I’m going to do the courses again but actually build the things in those courses as I go. I skipped re-watching Modern JavaScript by Tyler McGinnis and continued with React Basics and so starts the random note-taking…

React Basics

Okay after this course, I will have to continue on to React Hooks.

• React has been around since 2014!?
• I don’t think I did React Basics before, I thought I did — this is all new to me!
• Webpack does import export which I didn’t know, I thought maybe that was JS
• The declatrive vs. imparitive bit was interesting
• The Webpack part was very imformative, and I think to understand it more I’m going to build my next block from the ground-up

Started in on the first project https://github.com/aubreypwd/github-battle/

• Bunch of hello-world stuff (see tags on that repo).

Left off at https://platform.ui.dev/courses/react/managing-state-class-components-react

Decided to refresh myself by viewing https://platform.ui.dev/courses/advanced-javascript/javascript-inheritance-and-the-prototype-chain

Classes

• Created https://github.com/aubreypwd/javascript-inheritance-and-the-prototype-chain

Okay so when I created that Repo what I set out to do was just create these same Animal, Cat, Dog classes, etc but I thought I could get away with just installing Babel and just let it compile my JS in src/ to e.g. lib/ like normal. But I wanted to be able to write my classes in their own files (like they are now).

That didn’t work…. but I persisted. What I ended up doing is re-doing from scratch (and memory) what I did on https://github.com/aubreypwd/github-battle/

1. Setup babel
2. Config babel
3. Don’t use babel src -d lib on npm run build and instead use Webpack to bundle
4. Setup Webpack
5. Re-work my classes to be modules
6. Run webpack on npm run build instead (and webpack serve on npm run serve) instead
7. Setup the HtmlWebpackPlugin so I can just have an index.html file I can load that just tells you to look at the console

…and it worked, and NOW I get what the difference between WebPack and Babel is:

Babel is a thing that will turn ES6ish into ES5 if you do the normal babel src -d lib way. But it doesn’t do import or require well (like, in the Browser), and is very Node-like. Webpack seems to fix that. It turns your stuff into something for the Web (bundles it specifically). And if you have Babel configured, it “magically” figures that out and also converts stuff along the way.

While I had set out initially to write these classes (and I did) I also ended up having to do what I did in the React Basics again, from scratch and memory, and it helped me really understand the difference between: Babel, Webpack, and React… Great exercise!

So now I set off to write my Animal, Cat, and Dog classes.

If you look at the state of the 1 tag on that repo, my code looks sound. I don’t know why I got this error, but I was intrigued so I so I decided to investigate…

Okay 🤦‍♂️ I just needed to watch the rest of the video, now I get what super() does and is implemented in tag 2.

Tag 3 has my complete exploration of this class concept!

Also watched https://platform.ui.dev/courses/advanced-javascript/javascript-private-and-public-class-fields

So I was really interested in this private thing, and it’s implemented in the repo in tag 4 (so it turns out private #vars do work in Babel as of Wednesday, December 29, 2021).

So when I got back to looking at https://platform.ui.dev/courses/react/managing-state-class-components-react and the odd .bind(this) you have to do, I remember in https://platform.ui.dev/courses/advanced-javascript/javascript-private-and-public-class-fields there was a mention of a way to simplify this, so I tried it out in my https://github.com/aubreypwd/github-battle/ repo…

So I was able to get around the whole .bind(this) thing with an arrow function as the video explains:

Checkout tag javascript-private-and-public-class-fields on https://github.com/aubreypwd/github-battle/ for how an arrow function can fix the whole .bind( this ) debacle.

Back to https://platform.ui.dev/courses/react/managing-state-class-components-react

Now this isn’t an issue 🙂 !

Note, the quizzes on these courses stink, I just skip ’em by answering wrong. They are boring…

The cool think was in the video I didn’t have to do this, instead I did this:

• setState() not only sets state, it also causes a re-render
• See project-navbar-state tag

Added a function-components tag for github-battle where I converted my <Hello> React component to a functional one.

See tag project-languages-nav@2m32s

So after doing the work to make my <LanguagesNav /> functional component too, I didn’t need to do this:

He didn’t mention the arrow function in https://platform.ui.dev/courses/react/project-languages-nav

Also I caught on to the pattern I’ve seen before where Components don’t have to do props. e.g. in my example at tag proptypes@destructure or in this commit which behaves differently than the video oddly but came up in https://platform.ui.dev/courses/react/proptypes

• So import PropTypes from "prop-types" is how Component Props can be strictly adhered to

propTypes, totally get it, beefed up my Components, see tag proptypes.

Leftoff: https://platform.ui.dev/courses/react/the-react-component-lifecycle

React Hooks

…coming soon!

The other night I was explaing to my oldest daughter the effort I put (as a child) into creating the most un-useful and mundain things on my Apple IIe, like a BASIC app that just showed a progress bar that generated random sleep times so the progress bar would feel real. That’s in, just a stupid app that doesn’t really do anything… I was explaining this to her because she felt she had to build (not a computer program) something useful in order to build it.

The thing I explained to her is that I had SO MUCH FUN! As an adult, I don’t have that much fun building actual useful things. Building un-useful things come with no risk.

Taking my own advise

I need to learn a lot of things, especially with the way that WordPress is growing and changing. I feel the frontend-side of me slipping away from me slowly, and I still want to be considered full-stack.

And so, I’m going to take my own advise and start spending some time just building useless things on purpose! I want to look into more NextJS stuff, Tailwind, Chakra UI, and just build some wild stuff that isn’t necessarily WordPress or for a purpose (though I will be building a sort-of useful block as a part of all this).

10 DO USELESS THING
20 LEARN THINGS
30 GOTO 10

Now to carve out the time to do this…

Traditionally, the words for the four primary virtues of Stoicism are:

• Wisdom
• Justice
• Courage
• Temperance

If you're about to do a thing, you ask yourself:

• Am I being Wise?
• Am I being Just?
• Am I being Courageous?
• Am I being Temperate?

But, none of these words have ever really meant much for me. They don't reach out to me and explain themselves very well. They're very academic sounding, lofty, and words that don't guide me towards my next action. Sometimes they leave me asking, what do I even do?

So, I've come up with my own words for these virtues:

Wisdom → Truth

What does Wisdom really mean? — I think it means looking at the world clearly and truthfully. It's all about the correct knowledge of what's in front of you:

• What is really happening right now?
• Am I truly in danger of being fired? Is this just my mind racing away from me?
• What is this person's story, why are they really acting this way?
• Why is this bothering me? Is it really that bothersome? Is it actually bothering me, or is it just my attitude towards this thing?

Too often we look at a given situation and judge it almost immediately for face value. Marcus (and Epictetus) tell us to not to trust first appearances, especially within our own mind. I think this is at the heart of Wisdom. It's the ability to dissect and analyze any given perception or thing for its truth, absent (mostly) of our own judgements and opinions — seeing things for what they truly are.

Marcus asks us, all the time in the Meditations, to wipe our opinions clean and change them right on the spot! But, it would be wrong to think that Marcus is asking us to just have some change of heart out of no-where. To change our opinions, we need knowledge and that knowledge needs to be based on truth and examination.

• Why am I so upset about the dog digging a hole in the yard, is it really that hard to fix? Is the dog trying to hurt my feelings? I'm acting as if he is!
• Is the universe really out to get me? I just got a flat tire because of a nail, and it looks like it fell off a truck on the highway, the guy must have been in a rush for some reason — maybe to get to his next job he dearly needs.

It's the pause you take to look at something for what it really is, not what you think it is. Or, the gall to admit you don't know enough. With experience this becomes easier, obviously, but nothing stops us from pausing and acting when we feel we have the truth of the matter, or admitting that we don't have all the information to act.

Justice → Service

Justice, if you're like me, comes off very noble (rightfully so) and legislative,and more concerned about weighing what is right and wrong instead of what actually is right and wrong. In the books of the Stoics, Justice comes off more personal and neighborly to me. I use a version of the Golden Ruleas a reminder:

Serve others the way you would serve yourself

It's a reflective virtue. It comes with a built-in manual: if you want something for yourself, ensure others get it as well!

• You want "me-time?" Give others "me-time"!
• If you want to be understood, try and understand others.
• If you hate doing the dishes, don't expect others to enjoy doing the dishes.
• If you want to be wealthy, help others be wealthy!

The word serve is important, because it's not enough to just to "treat others the way you would want to be treated" (which implies that you only do this when you come into contact with them), but serving someone with justice is a duty and asks of you to go out and help others gain the very things youwant out of life.

Courage → Fearlessness

Recently I did an entire reading of the entire Meditations, and noted each time a particular theme came up. Fearlessness came up often, like a lot! It came up in a lot of different ways:

• Not caring what other people think of you
• Not caring if people blame you for things
• Tackling challenging tasks (not fearing them)
• Not fearing the future
• Not even caring whether you are going to die!

At one point I think Epictetus asks us, basically, to "fear nothing," since all un-folding of life is intended and natural! Since life is going to unfold how it unfolds (either by God or just being the way it is), it's best to not go out whining and complaining, but fearlessly!

I have a mental exercise that helps me ascertain how to fearlessly approach a situation:

Temperance → Detachment

Temperance, when you first hear it — it comes off as being cool-headed and patient. These are all good virtues, but how you do that is very hard to discern. In all my studying, I've found that the only way to be temperate is to detach from things.

Here's an example (from Epictetus) that I love to exemplify this virtue (paraphrased):

Life is a banquet. When a platter of delicious food is handed to you, sample it. If you're waiting for the platter to come to you, do not seek it out, wait for it to come to you. If it never comes, pay no matter to it.

I feel like the central theme here is detachment. "Sample it" he says, which seems to imply actually enjoying things (which is awesome right), but done so in moderated way (e.g. sample). Further reading will show that it's reallythe concern of attachment to pleasant things that is being disciplined. The gist of most of the Stoics is that if you continually enjoy nice things, you will develop habits and familiarity with them, which could attach you to said external thing — say if it goes away.

Furthermore, he goes on to instruct that if the platter floats about the room, to not want after it or seek it out. And, even more so, if it never makes its way over to you, or you were accidentally skipped, to pay no matter to it.

Detach from things: expectations, outcomes, wealth, behaviors, etc. It doesn't mean don't expect anything, or not enjoy a wealth. But samplethem, moderately and appropriately, and pay no matter if they don't even come to you.

Don't be attached to it, whatever it is.

Find truth, serve others, be fearless, and detach!