May 2025

May 21st, 2025

I used the seer stone on Lesson 3.1 (Static Site Generator) on boot.dev because I couldn’t remember the code or instructions—it had been a few days since I last worked on it. Also started the regex section of Chapter 3.

May 22nd, 2025

Worked on memory management in C at work. Lost my 13/15 sharpshooter streak because I didn’t read a question carefully—feels bad man.

May 24th, 2025

Productive day! Knocked out a bunch of memory management lessons at work since it was a slow day. My patients didn’t need much (a rare treat). Got my sharpshooter streak back—redemption!

May 25th, 2025

It was Sabbath so I had some friends over and spent time with my family. Didn’t get much coding done, but I managed to finish a short lesson in SSG before bed. Still making progress!

May 26th, 2025

Started using Mimo to casually explore front-end development. I’m really into Svelte, so I hope that by the time I dive into front-end work, I’ll at least have some foundation.

May 29th, 2025

Haven’t been able to work from my home setup lately, so I’ve been studying memory management while at work. A little progress is better than none!

May 30th, 2025

Finally sat down at my home computer and finished all the inline markdown work for the SSG project. Feels great to make real progress.

May 31st, 2025

Another slow day at work allowed me to study more memory management. It’s finally starting to make sense, and I’m genuinely enjoying writing in C!

May 2025 Wrap-up

Learning The Ways of The Penguin

May was a major milestone in my CS journey—I officially switched to Linux! I’d been toying with the idea for a while, but what finally pushed me over the edge was watching PewDiePie’s video about switching to Linux, followed by The Primeagen’s reaction. That did it. I took the plunge.

I chose Linux Mint as my distro because I wanted something that worked out of the box and looked familiar—my wife, who isn’t tech-savvy, would also be using it. Mint was a great choice. It felt less like diving into the deep end and more like wading into the pool—just challenging enough to keep me engaged without overwhelming me.

Then came the setup of my dev environment—which, wow, is a rabbit hole. So many options! After some digging, here’s what I landed on:

  • Terminal: I’m using Alacritty. It’s blazing fast, has fantastic documentation, and a vibrant community. I’ve uploaded my alacritty.toml in my config_files folder on this repo. Alacritty Screenshot
  • Shell: Switched from bash to zsh and installed Oh My Zsh. Haven’t explored all the features yet, but I love the customization.

  • Prompt: Using Starship for its speed, autocomplete, and customizability.
  • Multiplexer: I use tmux mainly to have multiple windows open at once, but I plan to explore more of its features soon. (screenshot coming soon)
  • Editor: I’ve officially joined Team Neovim! Still learning the motions and shortcuts, but I love keeping my hands on the keyboard. I use LazyVim for setup—it’s easy and has all the essentials. I also configured blink.cmp for autocomplete, which has been fantastic.Nvim screenshot

Boot.dev Progress

I started working on the Static Site Generator project this month and wow, it is kicking my butt! This is definitely the hardest project yet. I recently learned that this isn’t a unique experience for this project! I’ve been using Boots or a seer stone on almost every lesson, and at first I was feeling really guilty about it. What I have to remember is that it’s not a bad thing to use the resources and tools that are given to you to figure things out. That’s just part of the learning process. It will feel so good when I get it done!

I also started the memory management in C course for when I don’t want to work on SSG but still want to program/while I’m at work. I really like it! Like, I love the flow of writing in C, so I’ll definitely want to do my own project in it. I was also told that if I like C, I should check out Rust, so maybe one day I’ll get to that! But right now I’ll just keep chugging along with memory management and enjoying every step!

Current Thoughts and Ideas

I know I’m approaching my first personal project, so I’ve already started thinking about different ideas for what I want to build. What I’ve landed on is a recipe book/meal planner/grocery list app called What’s Cookin. I want to build it in a way that will help my wife and me with our weekly meal planning and grocery shopping, because right now we just use a Google doc since we don’t like any of the other apps out there for that task. So hopefully I can build something useful for us to use.

With that in mind, I’ve thought of different ways I could possibly launch it to others, so I’ve been looking at different frontend systems. In my limited time and searching, I found Svelte and I really like the concept of it and how it works. To help me learn HTML and CSS, I’m using Mimo again. Not super strict, but just using it as I think about it since my focus right now is Boot.dev. I’ve also started the tutorial on Svelte’s website to start getting familiar with it.

That’s what I’ve learned and what I’m moving towards! See you in June!