While working, occasionally take photos or screenshots of what you are doing showing your workspace, the computer desktop, the desk with pencils and papers and cables everywhere, the wall or piece of string with notes. Show the messy process of creating something.
Type notes on text files and save them with a name like yyyy-mm-dd-note-title.txt. Write notes on bits of paper and notebooks and journals with pencils and pens that you keep all around the places you spend most of your time in, including within arms-reach of where you sleep.
Practice writing down notes on a piece of paper in the dark, so you can do so when waking up in the night, before daybreak, to jot down thoughts and ideas from dreams.
Record messages and melodies using your pocket computer and remember to save these in your Process folder, too. You are looking for your voice.
Put these digital and physical notes in the Process folder and in the Process box.
Thank yourself later, in years to come.
You are what you observed. Experiences, memories, stories to be told. Put your marker on the map in time, that others may find and learn from.
I only found out about this many decades after it happened, but on the occasion of my grandfather's 60th birthday, way back in 1980-ish, my mother presented with him a large bound empty notebook labelled with his name, and explained that the purpose of the gift was that he was to start making notes about his life.
It sounds incredible, but he started writing.
All kinds of (what must have seemed) completely inconsequential stuff, what he remembered about the home he grew up in, the schools he went to, the friends he'd had, the whole nine yards.
He died not that many years later.
Note to everyone who's read this far: grab the chance to do this - either as the one writing, or the one who gifts the notebook! - while you have the chance.
"Tempus fugit" and all that.
I’ve given notebooks to my mom to encourage her to write, but don’t think I ever wrote her name on the cover. The next one will have it.
Also, consider recording a conversation between you and your loved one with the voice recorder on your phone. I have one brief recording of my dad’s voice in an old VHS tape that I burned to DVD and copied to the computer, and that’s it.
Memories.
Often the most powerful objects in films, to me, are photographs. Like the polaroids in Thelma and Louise and both Blade Runners.
Also old school VHS footage, like in Bassackwards by Kurt Vile — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOFWHty4XFQ — and What About That Day by Jenny O. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxCBnKu5jyk
Not all people, perhaps not even most, enjoy creating.
The past isn't always a fun place to go visit, even if it's not traumatic. Who you were and who you are are different people, and getting dragged back to that old self can feel suffocating rather then fun.
Strictly technical records? Great. Everything? Even if you want to keep it, you may find you don't like revisiting it. I have zip files which exist because I don't quite want to destroy old records entirely, but I certainly don't want to actually scroll into photos from 10 years ago.
It could help me to get guidance on current projects (learn from past mistakes and ineffective work patterns).
It could help others when there are many archives like this, to learn from others success and failures.
We all become training data for the future
Same goes to old project archives, emails, I have both HDD and S3 Glacier for them, but so far I have never looked at them at all, for 10 years, And I doubt I will look at them in another 10 years.
I am beginning to thinking Letting past go and You aren't gonna need it philosophy towards such things
Myself I use lightweight Xubuntu destkop for my VMs. I also dump hard disks of old Windows machines I am done with and make sure they run fine as VMs.
I have hundreds of project folders and it’s helpful day-to-day to just be able to look in ~/dev/2023 for current stuff. But it is also relatively easy to find older things since I have a sense of roughly how far back they are. Making a new year folder right around Jan 1 and rolling forward active work is always a treat.
I have a ~/dev/file_list.txt, generated by
find . > file_list.txt
I drag the output file into Sublime Text, so I can search the entire directory instantly. (It also works for entire hard drives!)
I’d say easily 3/4 of the best stuff I’ve ever done was never bounced from the DAW/NLE, turned into a non-realtime/static artifact from code, or otherwise made archival, and far fewer projects / prototypes / physical experiments got the respect of any capture of any kind.
On a certain level I like the wabi-sabi nature of that. On another I wonder how many opportunities to converse or collaborate about mutual interests or future opportunities went by the wayside because I ‘labored in obscurity’ for so much of my life.
I’ve been doing some coaching for folks coming up in my industry recently and this has been an idea I’ve tried to convey early and often - “always be documentin’”.
The author is probably talking about video editing of some kind, whereby he either regrets not saving more source code or taking more screenshots of his work if I had to wager a guess. Not sure what the "non-realtime/static artifact from code" refers to when it comes to video editing -- perhaps much of it was rendered from code? 3D software, programmatic editing, etc.?
Wabi-sabi being used a bit weirdly in this context, but I think they mean the temporality of it all has innate beauty. Sometimes not capturing every single moment/line of code is OK, and there is beauty in a moment not strictly captured, to be appreciated more since you'll never see it again.
But my GitHub used to be a replica of my projects folder, i would upload everything. I don't do that as much now a days.
Years ago I bought a Clevo-based laptop from a brazilian manufacturer, reverse engineered the keyboard LEDs and wrote a Linux user space driver for it. I just published it on GitHub and forgot about it, assuming no one would ever care. One day I opened my email and discovered I somehow had users and someone even built a GUI around my little program. I was actually a little embarrassed that someone had posted an issue asking me how to use the thing and I didn't even see it.
I mentioned another Linux project here in comments, someone submitted it and I got to engage with the community about it. Recently someone submitted another project of mine, a programming language, without me talking about it. Seriously made my day when I opened HN and saw my project on the front page. Couldn't even believe it at first.
It takes a certain boldness to put oneself out there. I'm always ready for negativity and criticism. Still, the results can be very nice.
I decided to give my website one year of an honest chance. I'll install basic analytics so I can see what, if anything people are interested in, and if I'm not satisfied or have a hint as to what about me or my stuff that people like, I'm out.
There's a point where sharing is painful due to the way prior things shared have been interpreted. There's no therapy or fix for that. People either care about you and your stuff, or they don't.
I've learned people just don't give a shit, even those allegedly close to me.
I started programming at 11 and don't have anything I made before I was 19. Mostly video games in C++ and small PHP projects I did for money in high school. It's fun looking back at what I have so I really wish I had the stuff from way back in the day.
My oldest program of any significance, a console based poker game, was lost with Planet Source Code and isn't in any of the publicly available archives. I started looking for it maybe 6 months after the site went down.
It took a while to find them back on the internet thanks to various archiving folks!
Well, maybe I could find it, seven layers of backups deep; I think it’d be named CHASE.BAS. But just as likely it’s gone, and now I’ll never know. (Hmm, next time I’m at my parents’ place I should try hunting.)
In my index, I track: name, status (active, paused, inactive), description, goal and a link to the archive doc if it exist.
My archive doc looks like this (I generally delete any sections that aren't relevant to keep these easy to create):
# <TITLE>
### *Handoff to Future Me: <project name>*
### *Snapshot Date*: <date>
---
### *Project Summary*
- *Objective*: Briefly state what you're trying to achieve.
- *Motivation*: What drove you to start this project?
- *Current State*: Is it in the ideation phase, research phase, or have you already built something?
---
### *Essential Context*
- *Related Projects or Dependencies*: Are there any other projects or tasks that are connected to this one?
- *Technical Specs*: For example, in your lamp project, what type of metal, what voltage for the lamp, etc.
- *Non-Standard Tools & Environment*: Any unique or specific tools you're using. For example, a specific code IDE or a special type of screwdriver.
---
### *Progress and Milestones*
- *Last Completed Milestone*: What was the last significant thing you accomplished?
- *Next Steps*: Like you said, for your lamp: research, clean metal, buff, etc.
- *Stumbling Blocks*: Any challenges you foresee or have encountered?
- *Any Experiments/Tests Conducted*: Brief on what you've tried and the outcomes.
---
### *Resources*
- *Important Files & Locations*: Where are the project assets or codebase stored?
- *Reference Material*: Links to guides, tutorials, or papers that are crucial.
- *Key Contacts*: Who can you consult about this? Even if it's an online community.
---
### *Handoff Summary*
- *Why Stopping*: Why are you pausing this project?
---
### *Notes to Future Me*
- Personal notes, reminders, or advice to your future self about the project.Have a great day.
I was just beaming about the virtues of shipping web apps as a single self-contained HTML file (all CSS and JS in the file, rather than linked as external dependencies) for unrelated reasons, when I found that my other web app on the Web Archive works fine because I had followed this principle!
(So it also works in Wayback's *id_ mode, i.e. shipping the original HTML unaltered, because the functionality is independent from where the HTML is served.)
I just recently bought a NAS for 20 euros and have been thinking about setting it up but am skeptical of relying on it for anything too important. But then again don't feel I can really trust anything too important to be in google drive either.
I also even have a hetzner nextcloud instance that I use for most low/medium importance stuff but I've found it a bit unreliable with the connection failing, mountainduck causing finder to crash, and the website getting quite sluggish when I upload a bunch of photos.
You can automate as much or as little as you want, but you have to keep multiple copies around. You can't trust any single source. Individual drives fail, tapes go bad, cloud storage can disappear or become corrupt.
The 3-2-1 rule is a good place to start. Three copies on two different media, and at least one copy off-site
1) You can never remember which copy is the master or the most recent. And a backup is not a backup unless you test the restore regularly. But with multiple copies, we don't have the time to test the restores of all the backups.
2) If any of the syncing scripts stop working, you will not know for ages. Unless you have another layer of monitoring scripts that watch your backup scripts. But almost no one has the patience to do that.
I have at least 3 copies of my important files, in 3 different locations. But I fail on both of my points above.
If you're not storing much then it's pretty cheap. For me it's mostly just photos and important documents, it comes to no more than a few 100GB total and costs me maybe 5 USD per month if that.
My old DNS-320 was ~100 euro new. And it kind of sucked.
I've never had a NAS before so wanted to play around with it before deciding to invest in a nicer one that can do more like handle Plex.
When I start working on a new feature for a project I create a PR on GitHub and document my research and then the implementation with screenshots.
I also have a text file on my computer where I write a few lines everyday about what I'm doing. From time to time I send it to myself by email.
It's relatively simple and low effort but has proven to be very helpful many times.
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ https://www.softwareheritage.org/
I think it would have been a bad idea to simply outright delete them, though I did delete a few.
In my editor project ( screencast https://github.com/samsquire/live-interface/blob/master/scre... )
and in its various components written in Nodejs, Ruby (sourceclassifier) and Python (dot renderer) and they're all in disrepair because I failed to pin dependencies.
Also recommend taking lots of screenshots.
> Not sure what to do with these besides deleting
I was recently digging through some old backups for fun, and have so many little exe's I built in highschool and college just laying around.
I moved to Mac shortly after college and made the questionable decision to back up my old hard drives as Mac .dmg files before getting rid of the computers, so getting the exe's into a running version of Windows to even test is a pain.
A lot of the older ones are pretty neat little games and graphics demos made for DOS. Be neat to get a little VM up on my site running some of these but I suspect it might be a pretty large undertaking.
It might not be too bad. I feel like there are a lot of little web assembly projects running on various sites that you could easily use. For a retro project I am working on I needed the MASM 5.00 reference manual and the site had PCjs running on it. Archive.org has there own web assembly emulator as well.
"The difference between science and screwing around is that in science you write things down."
https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history
The most grounding for me are screenshots and scripts with expected output.
The encryption software can be discontinued, or change over time and be backwards incompatible.