The Disaster that caused a Shiral

I just wrote a post about an issue I had a few months back (here), but I didn't really get into the full details of everything. This extra lengthy post covers some stuff around that time leading up to pretty much last week. If you want to skip the "tofu" of it all, there is a wrapping up section (Im sure there will be...) that tries to tl;dr; all the many words below.

By full details I just mean about "Hyper Focus" and the ADHD of it all... Also we will get back to "shiral" later, it's a made up word.

The events in the linked post combined with my somehow unbroken focus I was not panicking or stressed, but frustrated and my goal was to fix the issue (which I made 20x worse than it needed to be, focusing on the wrong issue).

The post also does not mention the actual time taken between the Blue Screen of Death loop and booting up again. Then not having most of my APPs I did have to reinstall some stuff, but overall it wasn't a huge deal there as files were external and recently backed up.

The bigger deal was that I was now breaking mentally and had no "drive" to put much effort into anything other than the day-to-day I had going on. I also soon realized that the project I was trying to get into an alpha state as part of a "bounty" was due in about 20 hours. This was for the Earn part of LearnWeb3 which is in beta, but this bounty did not have any other entries (except 1 entered soon after the bounty was released, but unsure on if it was legit).

Had my mental state not just been ripped, I would have probably gone into more of a Hyper Focus state and got something done, especially knowing their wasn't even a hand full of entries on this one. Let alone I just LOST DAYS of productivity because I decided not to check a simple wire first...

#100DaysofCode Challenge

I was super excited prior to this disaster, the #100DaysofCode challenge was actually helping me with time and the bounty had me digging deeper into a different blockchain technology that seems like a solid solution, which is Ceramic Network. When it all started to happen I was in the middle of finishing updates for Day 16, which I am continuing now (as I write this), you know, multi-tasking and inter-linking things, all that.

Being unmotivated and my project feeling useless as I was past the deadline, I missed the window... Hindsight I wish I still got it to the Alpha I had planned, but unless I find a need for what Ceramic offers in my tech stack I was mostly challenging myself to get more into Web3 to be honest. This can allow me to also stay more on top of blockchain related items if my mind has more consistency.

I have been developing in Web2 for over a decade and have been on the radar of Blockchain for almost 5 years. The biggest problem is trying to land and stay focused, especially when some kind of bias is built early on because of the state of chain. What? Okay, I mean the Ethereum gas fee's making it seem like a chain not to build for in terms of scaling, now I have nothing against it and never really have, but this feeling caused some bias against almost ever wanting to touch Solidity and I say almost because once Binance came along with their "fork" I got into a few projects, made some connections, integrated Ethers on a few sites and ended up making some non-standard + 2 BEP-20 contracts that were deployed and used on mainnet.

So moving forward now a few years I have been keeping my eyes on Nervos Network and developing locally with tools already being developed around the ecosystem. After YEARS of following the project I have finally started to try and get involved a bit more and it started with gaming. Something I used to do relatively too much and maybe now not enough. Scrolling Twitter and the words Crypto Game Night caught my attention, hopped in the Discord, ended up jumping in one afternoon where we played some Dead by Daylight.

As a side note I wanted to try all the things so I ended up playing a few handful of web/mobile "web3" games to see how they played, but also what Network they were on as well. BEP- & Polygon were the 2 I seen the most, but having looked at other various networks, I knew this was only the tip of the iceberg. It was all overwhelming in the end, especially when I was "gaming" for the wrong reasons, but along this journey I had the bravery to join the Crypto Game Night discord. Yes, bravery because at most times, doing something social can be scary, in that anxiety kind of way. However the drive here is Blockchain and Nervos since it seemed this little group that has begun, was started from members of Nervos Nation.

I am all for Nervos, am no "maxi" by any means. In fact when I finally publish this post (mentioned at the beginning) it started with Theta and regrettably not Bitcoin in 2012, but I did follow the Theta Whitepaper up with the Bitcoin Whitepaper and then skimmed the Ethereum papers + RFCs a bit before landing on https://nervos.org.

What's a Shiral?

So what I really mean by this is a Shame Spiral and for reference I was on more of a roller coaster, one with more ups, but this was a down moment, the timing could not have been worse. A month prior I had been laid off and some time not long after my wife was also laid off, which caused some unwanted stress. (Things are good right now, was just putting a frame of mind on the situation)

Anyways the downward trajectory of everything going on turned it into a Shiral, I was enjoying these moments of coding, working on portfolio pieces and moving forward. Every time I would write a line of code it was another step forward, putting in the work, no matter how small. 

My will to be social quickly reverted as its something of will to do, if you know you know... Thus causing Shame. Side stepping, I would say in the mix of their videos, these guys do a great job at showcasing and encounters of the #neurodivergent. This one specifically hits a few nails on the head and I won't sit here listing 50% of their shorts randomly...

The #HALTof100DaysofCode

At this point recording any little progresses I did or even posting about it in general seemed like a crazy task. So on a personal level I was still doing the challenge, but I did a little digital disappearance and even missed a few of the Crypto Game Night's when I was available, just not mentally.

I moved back to focus more of my time on my portfolio and what was needed for "the last piece", which can become reoccurring as a way to put off "something". In this case it would be imposter syndrome in the background saying that it is not enough or this or that, almost teetering perfectionism in some cases. Which can also cause lots of problems, focusing on things when it's time to move on. 

No longer posting my progress or any updates on Twitter caused this shame to exponentially grow, pushing me away, feeling like I failed, letting someone or something down when really this challenge is meant to be for personal growth at the end of the day. Call it overthinking on top of everything else, but I knew I may not continue at all. This was the point where there was a 50/50 chance it was completely done and to some it may as well be restarted.

The Missing Time

The year is 2023 and nothing, just sounds like a new intro, but welcome to an unedited heading.

Job, Portfolio & Shopify Theme

Now feeling somewhat mentally burned and unprepared it was time to focus in on something that was particular to a portfolio piece and actually tied 2 together. This would be a custom Shopify theme with a feature called "Tabbed Carousel" which was ported over from WooCommerce on WordPress into this feature. So the Carousel came first and then the theme, but the theme is something I enjoyed working on, rebuilding and understanding Shopify's APIs little by little. I will save Shopify for another post about the theme that is more relevant to my upcoming development blog series. The short of it, is I started refactoring the theme to the new Online 2.0 and realized this was a good time to enhance a custom product page.

This product page is actually another "custom" piece of the theme and it allows you to split variants if one of them is a "quantity" type. There is a bit of documentation on it that will come when the theme has been 100% re-done, officially giving it an official version release.

I was applying for jobs as well, I did get a few responses of the bunch I put out, but none that put me into a job.

For context, my portfolio is in a releasable state, but because of the imposter mentioned above, I would take any reason to jump trains and that is basically what happened next.

Each image is clickable and displays a page with a "case study" of each project. There are actually missing items from here, such as this easy win deployed specifically for another Web3 Bounty.  (Self hosted link if that one breaks)

Switching roles & "taking time"

So having been working remote since about a week before Covid, I have found myself doing more stuff around the house and got better at slotting time out for different parts of the day which included helping around the house. This kind of made the official "let's switch" easier, but still a transition nonetheless, which is that I am now the stay at home parent.

Just before the switch, my wife and I got into a discussion (before she was laid off) about me taking a bit of "me time" in terms of not putting so much pressure on a job, etc. All her idea and a selfless act, but of course not long after she was laid off and I would resume my search to help take stress off in case I did get a bite.

My wife's job search being very broad (in comparison to mine) she got a lot of bites, but also lots of let downs, in a quick time too. This was a rollercoaster of emotions on its own, but during all of this she was reaching out everywhere and a random contact within a group on Facebook reached out and thought she would be a good fit for a position somewhat in her wheel house (administrative assistant adjacent). So about 1.5 weeks of no job, she was basically on her way to a new job and this is when the discussion for me to be the stay at home parent came up.

To break it down a little bit of what the home scenario is like... I have 3 little ones who are in Pre-K to Grade 3, so 2 of them are full-time all week, also 1 may be doing some summer classes to help. There are also too many animals, which we can save for another time altogether filled with photos because everyone loves a cute cat/dog photo. And prior to this year, I had been the only one working, my wife was the full-time stay at home. She did some schooling last year and started to work at the end of the year (2022) and so this is the first time we both had jobs, but mine would soon come to an end.

Needless to say if you want to count in the cost of summer care, after school care, etc, etc, it adds up and in a time like this, I would rather cut costs. This is not to say I am not looking still, but remote work is where I need to land, plus more income means more crypto!

One of the downsides to my wife having a full-time job now, is that it makes it harder for me to take part of the current Crypto Game Night time as it currently lands in the afternoon around when my kids are getting home (time zones in affect).

My first Nervos hackathon

Why bring up Crypto Game Night again? Well through a butterfly effect(great film), from joining the discord, I got to know new people, got messaged by one of them, aka neon.bit. This was pretty amazing and left a good feeling, I decided to check it out and see what it was about, original tweet here about the hackathon. Turns out it is about an area that could use a bit of love, the documentation. As I have not yet had a chance to join any previous CKB hackathons, this seemed like a great place to start! CKB? This is the acronym for the native coin of Nervos Network and also has 2 meanings depending on context.

Years ago when I first found Nervos Network I read through the old docs and found it had lots of information, it will teach you what is going on, but when it came to building something, you were limited based on your own knowledge and willingness to push through. If you know rust you will easily be able to navigate and deploy tools much easier because the base language for deploying Scripts is rust. This breaking further down into RISC-V if you want to go down that rabbit hole of having a CPU architecture on/off chain. Nervos is the reason I started to learn rust, I am excited about the types of things that can be deployed using rust alone.

Going in to the hackathon, I had not accounted time and that it landed on an Easter weekend, which was quite busy already. I was paired with a mentor and discussed a few ideas and landed on doing something around Lumos as I had previously done this developer training course and knew there could be better documentation and maybe even a starting point for new developers. Really what I have started with this documentation hackathon is something that anyone could use as a starting point for front-end solutions. There is still parts of Lumos I have not fully explored and I began using the dApp to further test parts to make sure I am not missing anything key. (Perfectionism trying to kick in here as well, but becoming aware of it helped move forward)

The dApp itself will showcase various wallet implementations, creating basic transactions and even a "basic account" to help showcase some potential. There will be notes and disclaimers as well as instructions for running the dApp locally/offline so you can feel safer if using it to generate/load/export a new native wallet.

I did not actually submit anything, but there were some awesome entries made and can be found listed here. Two things, really happened and 1 was that I had this self assumption I HAD to make an update to an existing Doc and 2 I began to rely on the dApp for myself because I wanted to explore things I had missed, new things added since the last batch of updates and provide functionality. I am still slotting time in to continue and will push my dApp code live as well as make a Pull Request to the Nervos Docs to get my bit added.

In hindsight, had I looked at the weekend it landed on, I would have opted to just make the current docs more clear and clean them up. There is a bit of chaos going on already and I see many ways it could be re-organized, but that could be a next item for me, I wanted to provide something with functionality so people have a visual. I know there are many who learn by seeing and having the dApp will def. help because from what I see is we want to on-board everyone, which includes the freshest of developers if I am not mistaken... (Being User Experience orientated this falls under that umbrella too)

My own Roblox game

This is actually something I wanted to do a while back (years) and even had a map started, but it basically had a few props laying around, nothing going on. My kids have been playing Roblox and talking with them I landed on making a Cat Obby as my first game, something simple to help learn the ropes. So with this in mind I loaded up the map I did have, looked into how I could transform into a cat and that was my first real thing done in this game. I did look up a video, but it was over a year old and had deprecated method calls, so it gave me a good starting point, but I did find myself in the docs immediately and got it to work, yay!

(I turned into a cat if what is going on was not obvious :D)

This is exciting because it directly relates to gaming, which you could say I do have roots in. Whenever random ideas are flowing, it is a lot easier for me to imagine a game world in which it could exist. Like the idea of having NFTs being cross-game from giving access to the item on a Web based game to a fully launchable executable, it would come down to the users "wallet". And this could break down further to having multiple addresses if you like to have a new wallet every time you do something new.

Wrapping it up & final thoughts

Donairs are yummy!

I wrote this post for many reasons and one of them is to help get myself back out there. I plan to write shorter and probably more development related blogs/posts, but as someone struggling, I need a way to be expressive and through creativity I find it can really help. So if anyone who reads this gets any value from my ramblings, amazing! If not, I am sorry if I wasted your time, but just remember, you never know what someone else may be going through.

Mental Health is actually the most important part of anything in this post and I don't mean what I write is great, I just mean that you and your mental health are what matter. We should be grateful to each day as we get to be alive and if you are struggling with the day-to-day, it may be time to reach out for help. Easier said than done, I know, I am currently (mentally) fighting myself to go to a doctor and get on some proper medication. This stems from being against them(meds) on some level, while understanding our will to beat battles (mentally) sometimes needs the aid. And sometimes it could be as simple as finding a therapist, talking could be your medicine!

I believe overall, through the last few decades with things like Social Media doing what it did, it happened too fast. If you think about how long things have been around or some things took to gain traction, social media grew exponentially as fast. Cars have been around for how long and they still run on bad fuel, finally having alternatives come out, but even those have negative reactions. So not only have we now gone to a digital age, everything blasted online and easily accessible, but with this comes all the negative too. Imagine something as simple as a "friend" taking a bad photo and sharing it, this can happen in seconds, now there is a tear in the relationship and at that moment one of them is left upset. Now jump back 10 years from that (2000ish) and something to this degree was never quite possible.

I didn't actually mean to go on about social media either, but I do believe it played a huge part in the ramp of mental health issues because negativity sticks easier to a lot of people and this was the point I was trying to get too. When you have bad things happen and good things happen, you are more likely going to remember the bad times (first or only) and the impressions (or feelings) left will be greater than of the good time. The good times are more like shots of dopamine while the bad times just open a drain.

And for people who live their life on camera, they must be strong, imagine the amount of hate that flows there way because they really put themselves out for the world.

While this post became rather long, I just wanted to outline some things that happened and help myself get back into positivity as well as the #100DaysofCode while touching on mental health. My rollercoaster I mentioned earlier was going for a good few years before it just started a downward spiral. And yeah I am aware, but it just makes shame more powerful so I have to really find the enjoyable things to get this going back to the right direction. I have been "comfy" for too long as well and when Covid came, being stuck, made things worse. I was actually doing great pre-covid, but my mental health took a revert and after feeling <burnt/betrayed/let down/other words> in late 2021 is when I would say my "rollercoaster" began making 2022 a rough year. I actually went into this year with better hopes only to be laid off 2 weeks into the new year. And I want to point out that it was not a terrible thing, because my WFH duties and being at the place for so long was a part of this comfort I had.

Get uncomfortable

This is what finally got me inspired to get back into doing more of what I want and not what is expected. Find what brings intrinsic value and have that be something to strive for.

Join groups, hackathons and anything in the community you find yourself in, no matter how scary, you are your biggest critic and sometimes enemy.

Conclusion

While lots has been said and scattered in this post, I am sure I could go on yet, but I just needed a way to be a bit expressive, creative and push myself back in the right direction.

Act positive, be positive & think positive.

I hope whoever you are, wherever you are, you are having a wonderful MornDayNight and remember, YOU MATTER!