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Comment by DustinBrett | Hacker News Reader

One brick at a time has been my philosophy for a while and it's worked well. Making a bucket list of life, then turning that into to do lists, then doing the things 1 by 1.

- Travel around the world solo for years

- Find a wife, get married & have kids

- Build my dream website (https://dustinbrett.com/)

- Get a job in Big Tech as a self taught developer

It's been 10 years since I started living this way and it's worked out so far. Before living this way I had no real plans, just hopes.

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Your commment reminded me of a quote from The Score, a 2001 film with Robert De Niro.

”You want my advice? Make a list of everything you want now and spend the next twenty five years getting it, slowly, piece by piece.”

Works great until what you want changes.

True, I think every few years or so we need to sit down and write down our "odyssey plan" based on Stanford Life Design course.

Since the world is liquid and constantly in movement, our interests and values will change as well which is ok.

I guess when you start feeling that whatever you are doing is `iffy`, its time to sit down and think.

I think a big problem is that many people like me don't have the discipline to learn anything in depth.

Here is a service I always want: I'm in a prison cell. I cannot get out until the prison evaluates my progress on a target that I submitted for the service (say fully read a tech book and create a demo). I'd also setup a default end date which will be evaluated and confirmed by the prison. If I don't complete the target before the end date I get double charged for each day and food becomes shittier. Of course there is a hard deadline to make sure my bank account still exists afterwards.

I'm sure you could edit that list, come on, don't let some earlier you dictate what today's you wants or needs. Just keep a list (including all the achieved goals you already met for good comparison) and go on on them.

You don’t need a list if you do it as soon as you think of it!

And that is how you end up ‘doing a lot of things, but not getting anything done’ - if you think of lots of things all the time, anyway.

I feel seen.

That’s why I use a Jira board for my life goals /s

Make another list

Wow! It's amazing that I can run python in my browser using an IDE that feels like my daily driver. Even the little keyboard shortcuts, ctrl+} to indent a line of code worked as expected. I became so immersed I accidentally used alt+f4 to close a terminal window, and instead closed my browser!

Thanks! That's great to hear it was able to trick you a bit. In fullscreen I use keyboard lock to bind the Windows/Meta key, I'll add ALT+F4 also so at least people in fullscreen can continue the illusion a little longer.

Are you me? We have the same goals and philosophy. I love it.

I'm on step 2. I did the solo travel thing for the past 8 years. Trying to find the wife.

I want a website exactly like that.

Congrats on your success!

Very cool! 8 years is pretty wild, I could see still being at it had I not found my wife in Santiago. I ended up in 50 countries over 4+ years before taking my Chilean wife back with me to Canada in 2015.

We need more desktop environment / "OS" websites out there. I feel like one day they could be something more as technology is moving fast in the worlds of WebAssembly/AR/VR, so who knows what my site might be in 20-30 years. If you want to check out the source code it's open source, https://github.com/DustinBrett/daedalOS.

Thanks!

Okay I'll be the first to say it - having a working virtualized DOM and Dev Tools on your virtualized desktop themed site is pretty slick. Well done man!

Thanks glad you liked it! Credit for Dev Tools goes to https://eruda.liriliri.io/

That website is wild. Thats cool as hell.

Thanks glad you liked it! There other "desktop environments" in the browser (https://github.com/syxanash/awesome-web-desktops), but I tried my best to be one of the more accurate/functional ones.

Umm, yeah… I think you got the website ticked off. Seriously awesome shit. Did you have it in mind more or less like this, or were there a couple of evolutions along the way?

Haha thanks, much appreciated! The original idea came out of laziness and thinking it would be easier to just give users RDP access to my computer than actually design a cool site for my blog/pics/etc. I also give credit to Windows 10's UI for being so simplistic that I got inspired to thinking I could recreate it with CSS/HTML/JS. The code itself did have a bit of an evolution as my career in software development evolved and I moved from working with Angular to working in React. Over the last 4 years I've re-made the project 3 times, my latest iteration being named daedalOS and taking almost 2 years. I streamed most of it on my YouTube channel as I was making it and it's open source (https://github.com/DustinBrett/daedalOS) if you're interested.

I tried doing this, but the sheer length of the list completely scared me shitless. It contributed to my endless feeling of not having enough time.

Me too, but I think that it an important realization to internalize. My list would take many lifetimes to complete. This is an important part of being a self-aware person or some people call it "adulting". For me at least, it is easy to get scared and run away from it. The more productive solution is to:

Realize these are things that you get to try, not have to do

Prioritize a few items, ideally some short term and some long term.

Set aside the master list and work on your immediate tasks until they are complete you realize you dont want to complete them.

occasionally revisit the master list and update it.

It can indeed be dauting. I think once I had the list I tried to make a plan that allowed me to hit multiple goals in the long term. For example building my website in high detail was so that I could learn enough to get a Big Tech type of job. Traveling around the world at least partly was to find a wife and start a family. For me, I took all the items on my list and tried to turn that into a direction. I also prune/add to the list when I am feeling down and trying to think of what to look forward to.

Have a reasonable window of focus:

    [done chunk][done chunk]...[itemized list of expanded chunk]...[todo chunk]...
                                ^ now

I looked at your blog posts, and fyi they are alphabetized, not sorted by date - maybe you want to change the default sorting on that?

Am I still on the parody thread?

Right click -> Sort by -> Date modified.

And no, he should definitely not ruin the immersion and put some random default sorting in the blog folder. Bad suggestion.

I'll defend him a bit and say that I actually did want to do this and have a bug report out to do just this (https://github.com/DustinBrett/daedalOS/issues/70). But I also see what you are saying about inconsistent sorting. That being said I do have a desire for the site to be a version of Windows 10 customized to my styles, such as the desktop icons being sorted the way they are.

Also happy to see you noticed that sorting does indeed work manually still, but on load it's not behaving.

Ya you are right. It's actually something I wanted to do and planned to, but ran into a bug that I basically have been putting off cause nobody ever mentioned this except you.

Thanks for pushing me on this!

The existing bug: https://github.com/DustinBrett/daedalOS/issues/70

Ah cool to see that! I was reading the posts and got really confused because you said you were living with your wife and then later you were talking about moving to Vancouver and getting married and I was like, wait, you got divorced and re-married, but didn't write a blog post about it, what is going on here?? And then I realized it was alphabetical sorting haha.

That is one badass website!

Haha thanks! I'm glad to hear someone consider it badass. :-)

Very nice website.

I haven't played Commander Keen in almost a decade. Fascinating to see someone port it into a website.

Thanks glad you liked it! It's actually not a port but is running on DOS via https://js-dos.com/, same as Doom and Jazz Jackrabbit. I actually have my 8 favorite Shareware games on my website which can all be played.

https://dustinbrett.com/?app=FileExplorer&url=/Users/Public/...

Cool!

Seems like a proof-of-concept that an online platform for many old DOS games can be implemented... Guess I have a new project to add to my (very long) to-do list :)

Ya for sure. The jsdos guy actually has such a site at https://dos.zone/

The challenge with that, in my experience, is not getting distracted along the way.

Ya it helps to have some clear timelines to keep yourself honest. I noticed when I originally set out on my world travels that there were people who said they wanted to come that ended up being to distracted with life to take the leap. I keep my notes and reminders and goals very visible in my life through Google Keep and actual post it notes all over my walls. If I did have those reminders I would very likely do nothing and feel bad about it.

skifree on your website, that is awesome! in middle school technology class me and my friend Alex found a hidden cheat in skifree that racked up ridiculous high scores. if you situate yourself directly below the lift chair and press up so you stay right behind it, your score just keeps going up and up and up. without a doubt I can tell you that our high scores survived until that equipment was replaced and im certain it dumbfounded every kid in that class who played skifree for years how scores like that were obtained.

Glad you liked SkiFree. I actually got the EXE directly from the authors website as he gives it out for free now. It runs via http://www.boxedwine.org/ which can run all sorts of Windows EXE's. I have a similar childhood story of messing with old games, but mine was Doom which is why I gave it some credit on the desktop of my site.

impressive site, impressive achievements

hats off

Thanks, much appreciated! I wish I could enjoy it more, but something about the attitude that got me here keeps me moving forward. I'm the kind of person that always needs to be doing something which I consider of value, or else I feel like I am wasting my life.

“Making a bucket list of life, then turning that into to do lists, then doing the things 1 by 1.”

Sounds a lot like Getting things Done method :)

Cool, I hadn't heard of that specific method possibly, but it seems self explanatory. I've always liked breaking down problems into smaller parts, so maybe that has helped me in several areas of life. My home office is full of walls of post it notes of plans for my life and my side projects.

I hope you're proud of yourself - many people are now wasting serious amounts of time on your website.

Amazing work !

Haha thanks! I'm very proud to hear people wasting time on my site. It's a great way to waste time.

Amazing work on that website, sir.

Thanks very much! It's taken years of work and I still try and work on it daily if I can. I like to imagine what it will be like in 20-30 years (assuming I'm alive).

Your website is amazing, Dustin!!

Thanks very much! Hearing people like it is a huge motivator to continue work on it. Even when I could say it's good enough. I want to get 1 more "wow" out of someone, somehow.

Cool Website!

Jesus your personal site makes pretty much every developer site I've seen look like geocities. Hats off.

Thanks! I started with an Angelfire site back in 1998 and it's taken a long time to get to this. I always wanted to have a little miscellaneous site where people could come and play around a bit and check out some info about me if they wanted.

The idea to turn my website into a desktop environment came out of me trying to think how to present all my various content to users, and thinking how it would be easier if they could just RDP into my machine and see everything locally. Also inspiration from sites like http://www.windows93.net/, https://windows96.net/ & https://aaronos.dev/.

After visiting the website, I came here to post the same comment, and I see others have done the same. Kudos OP! Your website knocks the socks off any other website I've seen, really well done.

Thanks! I'm glad to hear you liked it. It's indeed a goal of mine to be one of the more interesting websites out there. Every time I think I am missing something or find a bug, I try and do something about it.

I've also taken a lot of effort to keep everything client side. This makes hosting easier and also adds an interesting challenge of pushing the browser to the limits just to see what can be made within those confines.

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