This is the first post of Inked Pages. If you subscribed before this was written, it means a lot. It’s exciting to see that there’s someone out there interested in reading what a random kid in university has to say. 😃

My biggest distractions after Instagram are probably rabbit holes. And when you think about it, it kinda makes sense. Given enough short bursts of interest in a particular topic and a device connected to the internet in front of me, I’ll be lost in the abundance of information to satisfy the thirst of finding the answers to infinite questions.

The idea for this post came up when I was with Jai, a friend of mine in Software Engineering (read his blog here). We were chatting about upcoming software startups and the daily drivers we use. He then looks at my MacOS dock and sees VSCode. To anyone from a non-CS background, VSCode is a software to write code. And mind you, we as engineers have very strict concensus for what tools qualify as daily drivers. So after seeing VSCode, Jai brings up his excitement for Vim. He talked about how awesome it is, how customizable it is, and how much faster it can be (relative to VSCode). Now, it’s not like I’ve not worked with Vim before. But it never lived up to what VSCode was capable of. And I thought, perhaps I just didn’t try hard enough?

Note that this happened during reading week, the week before midterms. It’s funny because that one conversation translated into a 2-hour long quest to customize Vim (NeoVim to be precise) and try to make it like VSCode. Eventually, I brought back my sanity and resumed studying for midterms. But it didn’t end there! Everytime I studied CompSci, I wanted to use (or rather, learn) Vim ‘coz it was seen as a cool thing to do. And as a software enthusiast, I’m always on the lookout for things deemed to be cool.

That was one long example to give you an idea of what I meant by a rabbit hole. Another one was when I explored Linux PopOS on a bootable flash drive and ended up using it for an entire year (!) because my old Windows PC was showing its age. I eventually gave up because of unsupported software and switched to the Mac.

The most recent example was during midterms. I started hating Amazon Music because of its trash UI and lack of Siri integration. I was debating which app to switch to. Being the owner of multiple Apple devices and a free 3-month trial for Apple Music, I decided to give that a shot. But that was after an hour-long Reddit search of “Apple Music vs Spotify” and understanding whether the better music quality was apparent on my Airpods and really worth it. I still regret that. 😭

Rabbit holes might sound like cancer, and to an extent, perhaps they are. But they’re also the reason I’ve learned a lot. Using Linux for a year made learning UNIX in my CS course so much easier. Learning touch typing reduced the friction between thinking and putting thoughts into words drastically. Exploring keyboard shortcuts on MacOS has made daily workflows so much faster. With the right balance (I wish!) between learning for good vs productive procrastination, (digital) rabbit holes are human’s modern periscope to exploration.

That was it for this week. See you in the next one!