🪴 gillchristian

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Mar 31, 2025 • 12 min read

What I’m up to now. Updated once around a month.

2025-03-31

Projects

  • ScriptureStudy: slowly progressing with improvements to the note-taking experience.

Books

  • ✅ Finished Notes from the Underground
  • ✅ Finished Digital Minimalism
  • ✅ Finished La Saga de los Confines: Los Días del Venado
  • ✅ Finished Novelist as a Vocation
  • ⏳ Reading Statistics without Tears: An Introduction for Non-Mathematicians
  • ⏳ Reading The Daily Stoic

2025-01-31

Projects

  • ScriptureStudy: added a views to list all my highlights and notes, rendering of notes. Next comes improving the note-taking experience.

Books

  • ✅ Finished Atomic Habits
  • ✅ Finished What I talk about when I talk about running
  • ⏳ Reading Statistics without Tears: An Introduction for Non-Mathematicians
  • ⏳ Reading The Daily Stoic
  • ⏳ Reading Notes from the Underground
  • ⏳ Reading Digital Minimalism

Misc

DeepSeek announcement made me wanna try Cursor. Way more advanced than GitHub’s Copilot. Like any other tool it’ll take me a while to fully internalize it and make the best of it. It’s already a productivity boost for certain tasks, much like Copilot was at reducing the need for typing the repetitive stuff. But is also gets in the way, I find myself reaching for its editing features at times when doing the changes myself would be faster.

2024-12-31

Projects

Reading

  • ✅ Finished Dune
  • ✅ Finished Elon Musk
  • ✅ Finished Object-Oriented Ontology
  • ✅ Finished More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop
  • ✅ Finished Art of War
  • ✅ Finished Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
  • ⏳ Reading Atomic Habits
  • ⏳ Reading Statistics without Tears: An Introduction for Non-Mathematicians
  • ⏳ Reading The Daily Stoic

Misc

Run my first ultramarathon. Ultra X Morocco 110k 2024

2024-10-10

Projects

Reading

  • ✅ Finished Working in Public
  • ✅ Finished The Heavenly Trio
  • ✅ Finished Attached
  • ✅ Finished The Acts of the Apostles
  • ✅ Finished Men Without Women
  • ✅ Finished The Road to Wigan Pier
  • ✅ Finished 1984
  • ✅ Finished Persuasion
  • ⏳ Reading Dune
  • ⏳ Reading Atomic Habits
  • ⏳ Reading Elon Musk
  • ⏳ Reading The Daily Stoic

Misc

Ultra X Morocco 110k 2024 coming in almost a month.

2024-04-30

Projects

Reading

  • ✅ Finished Desired of Ages
  • ✅ Finished Meditations
  • ✅ Finished Never Finished: Unshackle Your Mind And Win The War Within by David Goggins
  • ✅ Finished Animal Farm
  • ✅ Finished Really Good, Actually
  • ✅ Finished Days at the Morisaki Bookshop
  • ⏳ Reading Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
  • ⏳ Reading The Acts of The Apostles
  • ⏳ Reading The Heavenly Trio
  • ⏳ Reading The Daily Stoic
  • ⏳ Reading Beyond Training: Mastering Endurance, Health & Life
  • ⏳ Reading Elon Musk
  • ⏳ Reading 1984

Misc

Ultra X Morocco 110k 2024

2024-01-16

Projects

  • Podi => experimenting with a tool to connect different knowledge bases.
  • tycs => we are following the Tokio tutorial, building a simple clone of Redis. Here are the notes we are taking in the process. ferrum-field.

Reading

  • ✅ Finished Can’t hurt me by David Goggins
  • ✅ Finished Of Mice and Men
  • ✅ Finished Desired of Ages
  • ✅ Finished Christ’s Object Lessons
  • ⏳ Reading Desired of Ages
  • ⏳ Reading Meditations
  • ⏳ Reading Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
  • ⏳ Reading The Acts of The Apostles
  • ⏳ Reading The Heavenly Trio
  • ⏳ Reading The Daily Stoic
  • ⏳ Reading Never Finished: Unshackle Your Mind And Win The War Within by David Goggins
  • ⏸️ Reading The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn
  • ⏸ Reading Working in Public
  • ⏸ Reading Steps to Christ
  • ⏸ Reading The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper

Misc

Passed the Driving License theory exam. Soon will take the practice one.

2023-11-01

Projects

  • More improvements to Slate. Working on the editing experience now.
  • tycs => little experiment to run LLMs locally. gillchristian/experiment-0005
  • A few small improvements to ScriptureStudy
  • Built The Inbox, a very simple TO-DO app that only shows the last item added. A replacement to sending messages to myself on Telegram.

Reading

  • ✅ Finished The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well
  • ✅ Finished The 5 Love Languages
  • ⏳ Reading The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn
  • ⏳ Reading Working in Public
  • ⏳ Reading Steps to Christ
  • ⏳ Reading Desired of Ages
  • ⏳ Reading Meditations
  • ⏳ Reading Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
  • ⏳ Reading Can’t hurt me by David Goggins

Misc

Started to study for the Driving License theory exam here in The Netherlands.

Moved my Digital Garden 🪴 to Quartz and setup subdomains for my different content sites.

Built a flower bed in the garden, to replace the wooden one I had built in one afternoon last year. By spring I will have some nice flowers in there.

2023-08-29

Projects

  • Added MVP support for user accounts to Slate
  • Back to tycs, we solved a few more AoC problems

Reading

  • ✅ Finished Beyond Order. Jordan Peterson is 🔥
  • ✅ Finished Crime and Punishment
  • ✅ Finished Thoughts from the Mount of Blessings
  • ⏳ Reading The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn
  • ⏳ Reading Working in Public
  • ⏳ Reading Steps to Christ
  • ⏳ Reading Desired of Ages
  • ⏳ Reading Meditations
  • ⏳ Reading The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well

Misc

Thanks to the new keyboard I haven’t had any more hand or wrist pains. 🥳

2023-06-23

Projects

  • Inspired by Build tools around workflows, not workflows around tools I resumed the work on ScriptureStudy. I’m adding a floating (ie. draggable) window to place the editor for chapter notes.
  • Since OpenAI has their own mobile app now for ChatGPT, Pedro makes less sense. The Telegram UX for chat is way better but managing threads is awkward in a linear chat history and having to keep up with OpenAI’s features (eg. plugins, functions) means constant work. One of the killer features of Pedro is the sharing of conversations, like this, but it is now supported by ChatGPT as well. Still it was an interesting project and we might add support for topping up the credit and use it on demand, as opposed to OpenAI’s flat 20$ fee ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  • Built The Stream to post my thoughts straight from Telegram.
  • I did a little visualization experiment on the importance of having a clear vision when it comes to career and life.

Reading

Yes, I’m ready way too many books at the same time. I used to be of the idea that one has to read only one book at a time, but that only works for particular books that are really engaging and short. I read Man’s Search for Meaning on the train and plane rides of a weekend trip to Spain, couldn’t stop reading, to the point that I was disappointed the flight was so short and happy when it got delayed on the way back because I could keep reading before boarding.

But I discovered that I read more when I have several active books I’m going through, I make progress in each of them at different of the day or week.

For example, I read Desired of Ages as my daily meditation time (An Hour at the Cross). Steps to Christ, by the same author, I’m slowly reading on Sabbaths (ie. Saturday). Crime and Punishment, quite the large book, I figured I can’t pause random points, it’s better to finish a section, thus I pick it up when I have a good amount of time to read.

Misc

Got a Kinesis Advantage360 Pro. I was having recurring pain in my hands, wrists, and forearms. Although I’m still not fully used to the different layout, this is the first non-standard layout I use, I already don’t have any more pain. It’s not only the keyboard that made a difference, I also started to do exercises for hand/wrist/forearm at the gym which helps.

I started a garden and I’m growing tomatoes 🍅👨‍🌾 A neighbor gifted me some plants ready to transplant so now I’m basically a farmer.

I should probably make these into separate notes and link them here 🤔

2023-05-08

Projects

  • Little progress in Slate and ScriptureStudy
  • Started to implement ChatGPT for Telegram (Pedro) with Nico (@delvallenicolas). We want to make it more accessible to use GPT4. ChatGPT’s PLUS subscription costs $20, which is a bit much if you aren’t a power user. And also experiment with some ways to give more control to power users on the context (ie. previous messages sent as part of the prompt).

Reading

2023-04-07

Projects

  • Slate => started to migrate the editor to BlockNote, which is based on TipTap and Prosemirror. Which feels like a much better foundation than an editor built from scratch.
  • ScriptureStudy => added a progress bar to show feedback on navigation. Started to experiment with how to add support for verse selection which would enable to highlight, copy, and comment on verse(s).
  • Tsearch => experimented with using LLMs as the search engine but found out it’s not feasible. 2023-03-28 / 2023-03-24

Reading

Misc

  • Reached Master ranked on Wild Rift, mostly playing jungle with Vi. And made it to the top 100 rank of Vi players, the highest I reached was 68 (nice - 1!) I think.
  • Some thoughts on Programming democratized
  • Using Copilot and ChatGPT for programming: Precise prompts and specific tasks greatly improve the output of LLMs. For Copilot this means boilerplatish stuff like duplicated code is almost all the time correct but generic implementations like the body of a functions are often not what you want. Types and descriptive names and comments help a lot, since they serve as prompts. For ChatGPT what makes good results is asking what sort of answer (format, style, etc.) is expected and also instructing persona ChatGPT should reply as.

2023-03-01

Projects

Having a few projects going on in parallel is working out well. Whenever I get stuck or bored with one I work on the other(s), rinse and repeat.

  • tsplay.dev => A bit of house keeping. Refactored the API to use tie, added a support link, and did a few small improvements to the UI.
  • Slate => Moved the storage to a DB (rather than in memory) and added a simple profile. Also started to work on a better layout.
  • Migrated my website to Elm Land, from and old Next.js version with ReasonML.

Reading

Misc

2023-02-03

tycs Started to do a few sessions a week with ndelvalle to solve Advent of Code problems and go through the study plan of Teach Yourself Computer Science. Code: ndelvalle/tycs.

Projects

Reading

Misc

Reached mastery level 7 with Irelia on Wild Rift 🎮

2023-01-10

Joined Pinata at the beginning of the month, will be writing Haskell and Elm. The time at Scarf was great and I’ll miss the team.

Projects

Reading

2022-11-23

Projects

Reading

Slow reading this past month 🥱

2022-09-30

Projects

Reading

Discovered that reading more than one book at a time helps me to read more as having options gives a sense of freedom of choice as opposed to the duty of reading a single book

Misc

Started doing a little Woodworking, with the hopes of learning and building some cool stuff.

2022-08-22

2022-07-14

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