Productivity

I used to spend hours — sometimes days — squeezing every last byte out of code. Getting a program to run on hardware that “couldn’t possibly” handle it was genuinely thrilling. The demoscene was my inspiration: watching impossible visual effects rendered in 64 kilobytes or less. How did they do that? That mindset seems almost quaint now. Why optimize when you can just throw more hardware at the problem? Why care about efficiency when compute is cheap? ...

I have a confession: I spent years perfecting my dotfiles. Custom vim mappings, tmux prefix changed to Ctrl+a, fancy shell prompts, aliases for everything. My setup was perfect. And then I SSH’d into a production server to debug an issue, and I was useless. No custom mappings. No plugins. No aliases. Just vanilla vim with its default keybindings that I had completely forgotten. I fumbled around, couldn’t remember how to do basic navigation, and felt like a complete beginner. ...

I’ve been using the same .zshrc for years. And my .vimrc. And my tmux config. Over time they’ve grown into a carefully tuned system that does exactly what I want. The problem: I have multiple machines. A laptop, a desktop, sometimes a VM for testing. And keeping everything in sync was always… improvised. Finding the right dotfile management solution took me years. I tried everything. And I mean everything. The Long Search It started with the classic: a bare git repo in my home directory. git init --bare ~/.dotfiles, some aliases, done. It works, but it’s fragile. One wrong git clean and you’ve nuked your configs. And good luck with machine-specific settings. ...

You wake up. It’s dark. You hear a soft humming — fans, somewhere. Slowly your eyes adjust to the light. You find yourself in a container. Metal walls, a few windows looking out at… stars. Only stars. No Earth in sight. There’s a note: “You have everything you need to survive. Nothing goes in, nothing goes out. Good luck.” This is the thought experiment I regularly discuss when I’m in a philosophical mood with friends. It sounds like science fiction, but it’s actually a lens to think about systems thinking, circular processes, and — if you extrapolate — about how we treat the Earth. ...

For context on how my brain works, see Working with an AuDHD Brain. This is the stack that structures my daily work: taskwarrior for task management, timewarrior for time tracking, and vit as a vim-style interface. Together they form a keyboard-first, terminal-native productivity system. No Electron apps. No cloud sync sending your data to Silicon Valley. Just plain text, local, and blazing fast. Why This Stack? I struggled with task management for years. Todoist, Things, Notion, Obsidian plugins — tried them all, eventually abandoned them all. The problem was always the same: too much friction. ...