Agoraphobia and Thinking in Systems

We discuss our experiences with conferences pre and post-pandemic, the psychological hurdles of public speaking, and our evolving use of Obsidian for personal knowledge management (PKM). 📖 CHAPTERS 00:00 Overcoming the Fear of Public Speaking11:40 I LIKE TRAINS13:15 Exploring the Rust Programming Language20:15 Obsidian Daily Note System and Priority Tasks32:45 Using Spaced Repetition for Capture46:15 Morning Routine and Habit Formation 🔗 LINKS Ours https://robinwinslow.ukhttps://noboilerplate.orghttps://lostterminal.comhttps://modemprometheus.comhttps://phosphenecatalogue.com External A System For Writing - Bob DotoClojure: Turtles All The Way DownRust: Turtles All The Way DownFasterthanli.meObsidian.md 🧑 CREDITS Decapsulate is a NAMTAO Production (namtao.com) It is hosted by: Tristram Oaten (https://mastodon.social/@0atman)Robin Winslow (https://union.place/@nottrobin) This work is BrainMade (https://brainmade.org) Transcript DC2 [00:00:00] Tristram: A month ago I went to my first conference in five years. I think. Robin: Wow. Tell me about it. Tristram: I used to go to conferences all the time before the pandemic. Before the pandemic started and I realized that I had lost the, lost the habit I’d, up until that point, I’d pushed myself very, very hard to, into public speaking positions. Whenever there was something at work that needed a presentation or if there was a, like a, a club at work where people would bring little presentations and talk about things that they liked, I would force myself to do them because at one point I was really, really scared and terrified of doing them Robin: Yeah. Tristram: sort of exposure Robin: Uh, and Tristram: and, Robin: is it? Tristram: throughout my working life, I’ve tried to do these whenever there’s an in-person thing. and it started out small in just volunteering for like doing a presentation on the work we were doing something like that. But by the end of the 2010s, I was speaking at closure conferences, specifically closure X in London, the first time I just had a, lightning talk in my back pocket. And the next year I actually wrote a specific talk for. Closure X closure, by the way, perhaps some of our listeners might not know, um, is a lisp programming language. It’s the one with all the ens. Uh, it’s based on, based on Java. It’s the cool one if there is such a thing as a cool lisp. But, uh, Robin: people say people that use it. Yes. Tristram: yes. Right, exactly of the lisps, it’s of, it’s, it’s perhaps the coolest. the first talk I did at closure X, I actually repurposed into one of my rust videos, one of my very early rust videos. Um, the first slide is, have I got a deal for you? And it was about how great closure is. Um, because Rust and Lisp were so similar in many regards, I was able to reuse much of that into a, a rust talk. Robin: you’re at risk of exposing your, your, your patterns. I mean, you’re like, you know, closure. Wonderful. The best thing in the world, everyone should use it. Rust. Wonderful. Best thing. What should you said? Tristram: Right. I mean, I, if if tomorrow I find a new language that’s better than rust, I will start talking about that. There’s just been nothing, nothing left. Oh, I, I had to look it up ’cause I’ve, I, it’s seven years ago, um, turtles all the way down was my closure video. And then Robin: that. Tristram: years ago, right. I rewrote it into rust turtles all the way, all the way down. ’cause really I’m talking about like the, the macro system and how you can like build, build on the language without anyone’s asking permission. Without asking permission from anyone, Robin: saying is it’s really nice to have something that’s sort of written in its own language, I guess a whole system. language, basically it’s like, you know, you can, you can create the pieces, the fundamental bounding building blocks, and then you can build up on them and it’s all within the same, um, the same syntax. Tristram: right? Yes, exactly. Like the, the way the way you write a python stack is you build very fast plumbing in sea and then you call those modules from Python. And that, that gets, that’s, that’s quite a good way of doing things really. It’s a good separation of concerns, but it comes with drawbacks. Um, I won’t, I won’t rehash the, the turtles, um, analogy. So I, but I was doing all of this before 20, before 2020. And then either the pandemic or maybe just becoming somebody who does online things professionally, like I just fell out of the habit of. Going to conferences, like I’d worked so hard for 15 years to develop this. I suppose now that I’m saying this out loud, maybe my, maybe my itch had been scratched by doing the videos on YouTube, so I, it Robin: I, can I just, um, um, I Tristram: it’s, please, Robin: like I think most all, I don’t know if I’ve ever been to a conference that I organize my, like as in that I, that I did independently from ...