mcclellangg.com

Update March 2026

Mar 31, 2026

Garden Prep Month

Overview

March has been a full month. We got into a lot.

Took a class at the visual arts center Drawing Comics with Procreate. I finished (well plan to tonight) a comic, and need to post it ... somewhere. I love drawing, and I want to continue to do more of it. It's one of the few things that completely quiets and engages my brain in a healthy way.

Anki

I started using Anki to learn via spaced repetition. I review my cards with my morning coffee. I am hoping this will improve my knowledge retention. So far it seems to be working. I think I'll finally be able to remember with certainty, things that I am prone to forget:

  • The difference between dessert and desert
  • How many letters there are in the alphabet (I'm off by one more often than I think, maybe that's my preference for counting from 0 creeping in)
  • regex ???
  • all those disparate shortcuts

I'm gonna let Anki take over my life! Thanks Joe.

Garden Prep Month

For future reference March should be known as Garden Prep Month. In previous years I'm usually thinking about growing things outside far past the due date. This year we are actually, dare I say it, ahead of schedule!

I built a weed barrier trench, and it seems to be working!!! Usually the fear of doing home-improvement type projects wrong or sub-optimally gives me maximal analysis paralysis and I just ... don't do them. I'm proud of this one though because I kept my planning VERY minimal and tried to just get it done. I'm curious to see how well it holds up.

Programmatic turmoil

I also wrote an article this month (other than this update). I have been feeling a lot of mental turmoil working through my relationship with programming recently. I think that I have identified the key issue. Which is separating programming The Hobby I Love and programming A Skillset For Money. It's impossible to enjoy something or do it for fun when part of you is thinking "ok how can I min/max learning paths to extract the most value out of this skillset".

It bothered me so much that one day I wrote a ~900 word article titled 'Programming: For fun or for money?'. But I didn't post it because it mostly felt like an inflamed reaction to a quote I found on the internet that filled me with existential dread about "the craft of programming being dead". More importantly, I don't think it really is dead, just changing. The reasons I love programming still matter, perhaps even more so.

Things I love about programming

  • problem solving
  • creating things that make life better, easier, more fun
  • learning and researching
  • organizing with force multiplication!
  • The Community. sharing information, ideas, creations.
  • finding ways to do things cheap, free/frugally, openly
  • messing with computers (I just think they are cool)

Sometimes it just takes 100 hours

I keep thinking about what my teacher said "I get asked how to draw something like this, I say, spend 100 hours on it, that's probably about how long it took."

Far too often I fall into the trap of building a false expectation that I should be able to do something quicker, faster, NOW, IMMEDIATELY! The double edged sword of comparisons is just a click away. Don't fret over finding The Best Process, just find Your Process (if any). It's ok if things take time. Especially if it's something you enjoy doing.

Anyways, it has been a busy month. I'll try and post my comic after I finish it.

Content

Movies

  • Glass (Did not finish)
  • Happy Gillmore 2 (did not finish)
  • Twilight (3rd time charm, I fell asleep the first 2 times)
  • Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog
  • Hamnet

Books

  • Animorphs Megamorphs #3
  • Animorphs n30, n31
  • Reading Animorphs n32 ....
  • Paused House of Chains (too much for me to get into right now)

TV

  • SNL w/ Connor Storrie, Harry Styles (have not seen SNL in some time)
  • Black Mirror Series 7 (Hotel Reverie, Plaything, USS Callister to Infinity, Eulogy) (Love the 90's game dev aesthetic)

Music

  • RATATAT, Remixes VOL 1 (haven't listened to this one IN A MINUTE)
  • P.O.S., Never Better

Articles

Advice

  • On drawing
    • Just keep drawing, and it will get better, slowly improve on a piece
    • It's just like programming there is SO MUCH TO LEARN, it just takes time, do what you like and slowly build it up

Stats

  • Ran 37.6 miles