Austin Kleon lately has written a few pieces on how "you don't need a vision." He makes the case that visions are for things that already exist in the world, where art is the process of creating what doesn't already exist. In response to "Vision is everything:"

...this all sounds very inspiring — it really does pump you up! — but for much of my life, it would have been almost useless advice, because I didn’t really see any of my career coming. There was no clear path back then to where I am now.

It's this way on a project level just as much as it is on a life-sized scale. Many projects don't start with a crystal clear vision of what's going to make it on the page.

Sometimes the wind is in your sails, a vision for the project is so clear that it practically writes itself. Those can be so thrilling!

The only way we get those, in my experience, is with many projects that start in dark caves.

The lights are out and there's little sound.

Perhaps there's a north star, or a breeze indicating a path to follow. So much of the start can be groping in the dark, feeling the walls and floor gently, finding an indication of the way forward.

Dead ends are reached. Steps retraced. Sometimes early, sometimes late.

Sourced Via Kleon on No such thing as waste, Lynda Berry writes about this searching when drawing with four year olds:

I often find drawings begun and then abandoned… Something is not quite right and they need to start over. Then comes the issue of wasting paper. And of finishing what they started. But what if we were…talking about a kid learning to play the trumpet, trying to play a certain note by repeating it… Getting the hang of it, making it natural. Would we say they are easing notes? It took 12 index cards to come to this image.

Projects start here, but I'm finding that even seasons follow this pattern. For me, fall and spring are highly generative times of year, while winter and summer I find myself slowing down. It's applied across the board to software, music, art, and writing.

The challenge is to look at that cavern not as a discouraging block. But as a part of the process.

The predominant culture values linearity, but nature works in seasons and cycles. Overlooking that can make the cave feel never-ending.

Derek Sivers writes about how the two ideas are in contrast in "Explorers Are Bad Leaders:"

Explorers poke through the unknown, experimenting, trying many little dead-ends.

Explorers meander, constantly changing directions based on hunch, mood, and curiosity.

Explorers are hard to follow. It’s better to let them wander alone, then hear their tales...

Leaders are easy to follow. Leaders say, “Here’s where we’re going. Here’s why this will improve your life. Here’s how we’re going to get there. Let’s go.”

...Leaders go in a straight line. Leaders simplify.

Explorers are bad leaders.

Keeping a creative practice is contingent on the extent to which you are comfortable with submerging yourself in the dark time and time again.

Giving up on the search means being closed off to finding the way forward. Returning to the dark, though, means there's a chance of a new path being discovered.

That honestly is what ends up being the fun part of the process. It's an act of discovery when a piece starts to come alive, or when a practice continues to mature and grow after years.

It repeats time and time again. Since, as Gene Wolfe told Neil Gaiman "You never learn how to write a novel, you only learn to write the novel you’re on.”

I love what this means for a creative life. As Kleon put it at the start of this piece, In Free Play, Stephen Nachmanovitch speaks to practice as a means of uncovering oneself over time:

The Western idea of practice is to acquire a skill. It is very much related to our work ethic, which enjoins us to endure struggle or boredom now in return for future rewards. The Eastern idea of practice, on the other hand, is to create the person, or rather to actualize or reveal the complete person who is already there. This is not practice for something, but complete practice, which suffices unto itself. In Zen training they speak of sweeping the floor, or eating, as practice. Walking is practice.

With this piece done, I'll be stepping back into the cavern. Listening for the next indication forward.

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Getting back in the saddle on guitar! Been doing studies out of the Berklee Method to become one with the fretboard 🧘

🦊 🌠

Watched Neon Genesis Evangelion the other night. Still thinking about the colors and moods.

This month marks five years since I decided to crack my knuckles and learn JavaScript! I started mostly out of curiosity, partly as a pastime to balance my music teaching job, and eventually to explore a brand new career path.

Now firmly settled into the field, I'm surprised with how much I've learned about myself. Particularly, how I never expected to be doing this kind of work growing up, how it's been even more fulfilling than teaching music, and how well the field supports a life of exploration.

Life Can Only Be Understood Backwards

I'm grateful to have grown up alongside the web. Heck, I was born just a few years before Windows 95!

Now in retrospect, it almost seems inevitable I'd end up in software. But at the time, when I was younger, it was just a fun hobby with infinite ways to play around.

I find myself stunned by how well the timing of my life worked out to bring me here. Firstly, by how open and experimental building online was back in the 90's and 2000's.

Jim Nielsen illustrates this in "Making a Website is for Everyone":

I made my first website as a young teenager because the barrier was so low (and I dropped out of my very first computer science course after the very first class because the barrier seemed so high)... I absolutely love the idea of actively preserving a low barrier to entry for future generations of people.

The web’s low barrier to entry led me to a career that has been a boon for my life. I hope it can do the same for others.

It didn't even take JavaScript to get a website going then! It was accessible and free. Something very down to earth while also being exciting and full of places to explore!

I also lucked out with a tinge of right-place-right-time with my career. I was early on enough in my life a few years ago to take a risk on switching fields. That intersected with a general need in the market for more programmers, regardless of educational background. (I know the past couple of years are an exception to that, but I hold optimism that the pendulum will swing the other way with time.)

My parents didn't know that HTML and CSS would lead to a career. (Somehow music was more promising to all of us??) If anything, sometimes I was told I was spending too much time in front of these dang computers! But, here we are.

To paraphrase Austin Kleon in Steal Like An Artist: Never throw any part of yourself away. I was tempted as a musician to be only a musician, but I kept up with tinkering on computers. I didn't realize that putting together websites for music projects would eventually lead me here.

I suppose it's true! As Kierkegaard puts it, "Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards."

Giving Through Creation

Artist Carolyn Yoo and I are both 32. My favorite line from her 23 lessons upon turning 32 is this one:

Give however you enjoy giving, whether that’s through food, money, knowledge, or presence. All forms of giving have immense value depending on the recipient.

I have the good fortune of knowing many people for whom Service means a direct, one on one connection. Teaching, chiropractic, volunteering.

I've felt at odds for a while. The type of service I give isn't that obvious on the surface. This was especially poignant when I left teaching. How could anything beat shaping the next generation?

However, Carolyn's perspective here mirrors what I've come to find in software. There are some people who's greatest gifts are in engaging with the process of creation and sharing what they make. And hey, wouldn't you know it, that's me!

There are many ways to create things that serve people. What I've found, though, is that software is one of the most well supported, widely appreciated, and broadly impactful mediums to create through. Likely, if this is your chosen field, your gift is in making.

Lead With Curiosity

Software has been one of the most natural things in the world. I'm surprised by how never-ending my curiosity is in the field. With programming, I wake up lead by the call to explore something new. And there's no end to where that road will go.

If there's anything to share at this milestone, I'd share advice that I recently passed on to a friend entering the field. Let curiosity lead the way.

Put yourself in a position where you have a chance to explore broadly and/or deeply. Continually find new things to learn. Once you've learned and made enough, you'll get paid to do it all over again in a new way, all the while helping people solve real problems.

Maybe for you that's in another field! But I'll say that Software is a discipline where the work supports exploration profoundly well.

Here's to many more rotations in the cycle of learning, creating, and serving!

🌄

There are great benefits to be had when bundling an application in a Docker Image. Namely, maintaining control over the environment, including runtime versions, package managers, and environment variables. From a development standpoint, developing with docker can ensure all those same benefits on your local machine, instilling confidence that there won't be any unforeseen errors due to a difference in build environment.

So! Today I'll dive into how you can take your docker image and throw it up on AWS for deployment.

Services

We'll be looking at using two services: Elastic Container Services (ECR) and Elastic Container Registry (ECR)

ECS is the platform which will actually enable us to setup the hosting environment for our application. When configured with AWS Fargate, much of the nitty gritty of instantiating separate services is taken care of.

ECR is the AWS proprietary image repository for hosting your docker image on build. ECS will reference our specified repo to find the image to build our app from. ECR stores images based on versions, or tags as they're called. You can set a tag by version number or any other unique identifier, and then rollback if you ever need to.

Setting Up the AWS Services

To setup ECR and ECS, I'll recommend logging into to the AWS console and setting up your repo in ECR and creating a Service and Task in ECS. The sensible defaults should be ok with getting you started. Official AWS tutorials may be helpful to reference as you do so.

To keep this post brief, I'll be focusing on the CLI deployment.

Deploying to ECR

Assuming we have a working Dockerfile and application, here's how we can get started.

We'll start with building the image locally. This can later be automated in a CI/CD process. For now, though, we'll do it through the command line:

$ docker build --no-cache -f myapp.Dockerfile -t <AWS_ACCOUNT_ID>.dkr.ecr.<AWS_REGION>.amazonaws.com/<ECR_REPO_NAME>:<TAG> .

Be sure to run this from your project directory, or change the . to refer to the root of your project.

Biggest thing to note here is that we're tagging our image with the -t flag. The tag we are giving it should match with all of the AWS specific variables provided above.

Once that's done, we'll log in and retrieve AWS permissions to push our image in the following step:

$ aws ecr get-login-password --region <region> | docker login --username AWS --password-stdin <AWS_ACCOUNT_ID>.dkr.ecr.<AWS_REGION>.amazonaws.com

Be sure that you have in your env variables the appropriate AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY. Those will override any variables set in your aws command line profiles.

From there, we're set to push the image!

$ docker push <AWS_ACCOUNT_ID>.dkr.ecr.<AWS_REGION>.amazonaws.com/<ECR_REPO_NAME>:<TAG>

Running Your ECS Task

You can run your task from the AWS portal, though while we're here, we may as well fire it up from the command line!

$ aws ecs run-task \
  --cluster <CLUSTER_NAME> \
  --launch-type FARGATE \
  --task-definition <TASK_DEF> \
  --network-configuration "awsvpcConfiguration={subnets=[<subnet-id>],securityGroups=[<security-group-id>],assignPublicIp=ENABLED}"

Swapping all of your appropriate variables here will enable you to spin up the application, now deploying to a subnet of your choice and soon running on AWS!

Collectathon Island's magical power-orbs have been scattered all over the place! We need a lovable 3D anthropomorphic mascot to use their signature jumping and running abilities to return them all.

Inspired by Richard Jacques, David Wise, and countless summers playing platformers.

Purchase on 🤘 Bandcamp and Listen on 🙉 Spotify or any of your favorite streaming services!

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From FFX! Wildly beautiful. For 9 year old Chris, this was the midi arrangement that played on his Neopets page! 😂

Been thinking about Chrono Trigger lately! "Ma'am, you're mistaken, I'm not a pet, I'm a Knight and master swordsman."

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Lingering musical thoughts after the Maggie Rogers & Leon Bridges duet in Dallas

Music making really pivoted for me once I started asking what success in that realm meant for me. There are plenty of prescribed defenitions. The surprise came when I reached the end of a success script empty handed.

So, here are a few different voices in support of taking the time to answer that question.

From Derek Sivers:

Never forget that you can make your role anything you want it to be.

Anything you hate to do, someone else loves. So find those people and let them do it.

For me, I loved sitting alone and programming, writing, planning, and inventing. Thinking of ideas and making them happen. This makes me happy, not business deals or management. So I found someone who liked doing business deals and put him in charge of all that.

If you do this, you’ll encounter a lot of pushback and misunderstanding, but who cares? You can’t just live someone else’s expectation of a traditional business. You have to just do whatever you love the most, or you’ll lose interest in the whole thing.

From Mike Lowenstern:

While I was still doing the freelance/orchestra life, I never felt completely fulfilled. I was working, but I was working with a lot of people who would read magazines during concerts (no, I’m not kidding. They had them on their music stands) and complain during breaks. Many were very, very unhappy. And there I was, feeling their negativity pretty acutely, and thinking to myself, there are hundreds of musicians who would kill to do this job you’re endlessly complaining about. It was around this time that I decided to switch tracks, and to make an attempt to be successful outside of music, and to pour my energy into the business sector to see how far that would take me. It was a good decision for me, and ironically, it gave me the freedom to become much more successful INSIDE the music world.

... If you want to feel fulfilled as a musician, you need to ask yourself a few questions:

What fulfills you as a musician?... [And] What fulfills you as a person? Is it playing music you love? Teaching someone else to play and love music? Is it the freedom to do what you want (e.g. without needing to worry about money)? Again, each of these requires a different path.

From Dana Fonteneau:

Success is a process, not a destination; a becoming, not a formula...

If we don't stop to question the paradigms, we're blindly following someone else's map without knowing where we are or where we're going.

It's summer time and I'm feeling inspired to spin my "now" page back up!

Software

I've been in software for 3 years now! Still enjoying my time at AptAmigo.

So far, I've commited to learning a new programming language every year. This year, I've been having fun getting familiar with Java. The type system paired with VS Code intellisense is lovely.

Now having had a few years of experience working professionally, I've really taken a liking to sharpening my thinking by writing short tech articles. It's a great space to share what I'm working on and find clear ways of explaining it. My favorite part is when someone comes across a problem I've faced already. I can reach back to my own post to help them through the solution!

You can keep up with my tech articles through the tech tag on my blog. You can also find me on LinkedIn.

Music

I'm bouncing between playing guitar, piano, and writing my own music. To paraphrase W.A. Mathieu, it's fun to have many pots boiling!

After decades of communal music making and monophonic sound on the saxophone, I'm thrilled to be exploring independent and polyphonic instruments.

To make things even more interesting, I'm putting most of my focus on learning jazz on piano and guitar. A friend of mine told me that it's actually the way to go — to learn the vocabulary harmonically as opposed to in a scalar way.

For music writing, it's been fun to keep it loose! I take what ever I'm listening to at the moment, deconstruct it, and turn it into something new. It's a wildly fun outlet!

You can browse my mini albums here. You can keep up with my guitar and piano playing through the music tag on my blog. I'm also sharing recordings on Instagram.

Art

A couple of years ago I dedicated myself to learning how to draw and create digital paintings! I used to make my own comics growing up, but I always assumed my sister had all the talent. After switching from music to code, I realized I could learn anything. So I may as well learn a skill I've only ever dreamed of having! 🙂

I'm spending time balancing the fundamentals with just fooling around. This year has been all about figure drawing, direct painting, and making silly little digital sketches. The best part is that I have an excuse to revisit cartoons, comics, manga, and video games as sources of inspiration!

You can see what I've made so far through the Art tag on my blog. I'm also sharing drawings on Instagram.

Dallas

Living in Dallas with Miranda and our dog Lucy! We moved from Austin a couple of years ago so Miranda could attend Parker University for their Doctor of Chiropractic program. Only a year left as of this writing, then we'll see where we end up next!

So far it's been my favorite metro area in Texas to live in. Downtown is just a quick drive from where we are. But, in the other direction, artsy Denton is not far either.

All good things!

👋

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🚞 An oldie but a goodie

My original album cover for Noodle Bird was pretty crunchy. 😅 So I whipped up a new rendition!