[Saadia] It's a chapter

A Johnny decimal checkin, discussion on the Red Line System (Method? Workflow?). and a desperate plea for help.

An async podcast by Saadia Carbis and Joshua Wold.

Chapters

• 0:00 The Fellowship of the Ring
• 0:42 Johnny Decimal checkin
• 3:24 Read it later
• 5:48 Red lines
• 10:11 Busyness

Transcript

0:00

Hi, welcome to Async. This is Saadia. Async is a back and forth conversation between Joshua and myself about technology, app development, and remote work. So let's start with follow-up, as per usual. Joshua, you were talking about one of my favorite movies of all time, The Fellowship of the Ring. And you said something about it that I wanted to add to. You said that it's a movie where human nature really shines through. Well, I want to tell you it's not only human nature that shines through, but also elven, dwarven, and halfling nature. You can't forget about those other races. Also want to do a little check-in with the Johnny Decimal System. It's a system whereby I've got all of my folders on my computer and my notes also organized in a numeric way. So I group things from like 0 to 9, 10 to 19, 20 to 29, and so on. So that eventually, and then there's like point system on top of that. So that this Async podcast, if I want to find it, I'm going to open up documents and then I'm going to go to the 40 to 49 projects folder, and then the 42 blogs and podcasts, and then 42.02 is Async. And I keep all my Async files in there. Now you mentioned that you have a system of dating files with year, month, day, which that also, that works great. And I want to say that also it can work inside the Johnny Decimal System, because I just have all of my files inside of Async, inside of that folder. It's more like a place to put projects, a place to put like, I don't know, it's a way of grouping, not a way of naming files. And so I think that the year, month, day system would continue to work for you. One thing I've found, it's been working well, it's been working well for me. But one thing I've found is, in general, there's a lot of folder opening, there's a lot of nested folders, and click here, click here, click here, click here, and now I've got access to it. And that feels annoying sometimes. I don't know if you have any ideas on how I could solve this. I don't want to fill up my finder sidebar with a bunch of folders there that are arbitrary, based on what my current... I don't know, like I've been doing a lot of Dungeons & Dragons stuff in the last two weeks, but I'm not going to be for the next three weeks. And so I've been clicking through, you know, like, documents, hobbies, games, Dungeons & Dragons, and then within there, I've got like a folder for my rulebooks, and then I've got a folder for the group that I run, so then I open that folder, and then, you know, there's folders within folders within folders, and just, I don't know, maybe I should use a different file organization system, I don't know. But other than that, it's working really nicely, and I feel more organized. A system for reading later. So how... So, okay. Reader, first of all, Reader is what I use for my RSS feeds. R-E-E-D-E-R. And it's great. I also follow a couple of BlueSky accounts and Mastodon accounts in there. Reader supports this natively. You just say, oh, it's a BlueSky account, you put it in the username, and it's done. I don't interact with these people. I don't open BlueSky. I don't have anything like that. I'm not even signed in in Reader. All I do is just get the updates as though they were a post, and that suits me pretty well. And so that's what I've been doing in terms of Reader. And then when I see something that I really like, or that I want to talk about, or I want to maybe write about on my blog, I'll just open up my note. All right. So my note, I can find it under... It's a particular note. It'll be 42.01, Digging for Fire. And in that note, I've got a list of topics I could write about, and I'll pop that in there with a link. I don't have a Read It Later system. I know lots of people use this, and I've tried to in the past, but I just could never really get into it. I'd never really make it work. I guess I'm not really tuned well for long-form reading. And so Read It Later, I'll just read it now, or maybe I'll skim it now, but I'm probably not going to like... Well, it's not really long-form. It's long-form blogs, right? It's like not really very well-tuned to read two to five A4 pages. I'll happily read a long novel, but that's a different thing entirely. I just don't like reading on a screen. So I'm happy to read a blog post, and of course I'm reading code all day, but long-form-ish, you know, multiple pages long, it's not really my jam on my phone or on my computer. Maybe if I had an e-reader, I could link that up with a Read It Later system. But now I'm in like all new habits, so I just don't use Read It Later. I just, if it's too long, I'll just ignore it, I guess, or I'll skim it. All right, I wanted to talk about also your design system. Now, as we've established on previous episodes, you have got to be writing a book about how you do design, what's unique to what you're doing. And the Red line system is a chapter, man. It's great. It's brilliant. I love it. It's simple. You know what I love about it is it's a difference between WordPress and Jekyll, where it's a difference between a CMS that stores everything in a MySQL database and a static CMS that pulls everything from markdown files. I say that because if you, if WordPress ceases to exist or maybe you forget how to use it or you pull backup of your website and you don't really, you know, want to go through the hassle of reinstalling WordPress and getting a database up and running and importing and exporting, that's complicated. And maybe you don't even have the technical expertise to be able to do that. So you kind of lost your content in that case. But if you've got a Jekyll site or any of these CMSs that use markdown for the blog posts, well, your posts are right there, regardless of whether the JavaScript build is able to run. You have them just as markdown files, which are extremely readable. And even if the markdown format disappears, and that's why I love markdown, right? Even the markdown as a format is this same way. Even if we lose all of the markdown readers in the world, markdown is still readable. It still makes sense. It makes sense to have a hash for a heading. It makes sense to have things between asterisks italicized or emphasized. So that's where the red line system also just makes sense. You don't need... If you said, oh, well, I do the red line to cross it out, and then I leave my notes in blue. If there's something I still need to think about, I make that yellow. And then this other thing, sometimes I'll put in some green in this other situation. Well, now you need a legend. Now you need to explain it to other people who are on the project. And you come back 10 years from now, and the system maybe is lost to time and forgotten, and you don't know what it means. But with a red line system, it still makes perfect sense. It's still great. It does depend on something though. And it depends on you doing what we typically tend to call fat marker sketches. I believe that term comes from Ryan Singer's book on... What's it called? I can't remember. Basically on development workflows, fat marker sketches. It's this idea that you're not designing in detail. You're designing with a very, very minimal amount of detail. It's more about flow and less about aesthetics. Occasionally you might dive into a specific interaction, but you should be able to do the design with a single fat black marker. Or maybe a fine tip black marker, but you know, each to their own. And the red line system depends on that because it depends on being able to change the colors of the lines into red. If you had a visually complex design with, you know, all of the colors involved, a high fidelity design, yeah, you can put a red line through it, but you can't turn the lines red. So anyway, that's something to think about. I like that though, because it means that there's this red line system, maybe it doesn't work in isolation. Maybe it only works if it's incorporated into your broader design system, which I'm eagerly anticipating the book for. So yes, I don't know about the title, red line system. Maybe it's a method or a red line workflow. Red line system sounds too much like design system, which I think it's a child of, it's a dependency of. Anyway, I wanted to bring up the topic of busyness. I know you've mentioned that you've had a lot going on in your personal life and you've just been flat out. I also have been flat out. And that really, the only reason I'm recording this podcast is that I am so tired from working late last night that I just don't have the energy to focus on development tasks right now. And so I am putting it off and recording a podcast instead and telling myself, at least I'm being productive. I've got so much to do. I think I'm probably doing, pulling like a 70 hour work week, which is crazy when you have five kids and a working wife. It's just like, it's not sustainable. And I don't know what I'm going to do about it. There's nothing in there. I can really afford to can. What do you suggest?