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Everything — blog posts, experiments, notes, guides, micro entries. Reverse chronological. Filter by type below.
Hiking - It's been unseasonably warm here in Indiana this March, so there has been tons of hiking and walking with Moose. We found this hidden gem near us called Leonard Springs, and it was a short and sweet hiking trail on the remains of the old reservoir here in Bloomington.
PC Build - I built my first PC which I did a quick parts list of here. It was fun! It had been a long time since I had messed with anything tech wise like that, and I had a blast actually (physically) putting something together
The Newfields Museum - Andrea and I went to the Newfields Museum of Art for Valentine's Day. If you live within a reasonable distance of Indianapolis, I would highly recommend planning a visit. It's larger than one would expect, taking up 4 floors of large exhibits. During our visit, we got to the Connection; Land, Water, and Sky. Art from Indigenous Australians before it left. Andrea really loved Resplendent Dreams: Reawakening the Rococo, which featured works from Diego Montoya who we had previous seen in ¡Presente! about from the National Museum of the American Latino. Presente was one of the last exhibits we went to before moving from D.C to Indiana, so it was nice to draw some connections.
Something I find really depressing is that I went pretty much all of 2025 without writing much. I spent a lot of time focusing on my reading goals (which I hit for the first time in years), but the lack of writing and creative outlet has hit me relatively hard within the past month.
So, I'll try to start this up again if I can. Maybe actually use my colored pencil set as well.
So, I finally built my first PC. And like any reasonable ADHD person starting a hobby, I went way overboard. My intention was to use this machine mainly for gaming. In terms of components I installed:
- Case - Fractal North
- CPU - Ryzen 7800X3D
- GPU - Gigabyte Aero Geforce 5080 OC
- Motherboard - MAG X670e Tomahawk Wifi
- AIO - BeQuiet! Pure Loop 3
- RAM - 64gb Crucial Pro DDR5 6000MHz
- PSU - BeQuiet! Dark Power 13 1200W
I've finally hit my reading goal for the first time in years. While 30 books may not feel like a lot to the avid reader, it is somewhat of an accomplishment for me. Throughout the course of the year I've spent a lot of time in tracking apps, trying to make sure I was accurately capturing my time spent reading. None of the existing apps truly felt like they suited my needs.
Goodreads was too, well, Amazon. Fable just… not my thing. Storybook was too graph/stats heavy with too much friction towards the main goal (tracking books) and Margins too AI focused. Most all that I tried left something to be desired user experience and performance wise.
It's pretty clear, even to the average consumer who doesn't write code, that the world of AI has changed software development in a way few people could have predicted. I think every software developer at some point within the last 4 months has been asked if they are afraid for the future of their career.
Don't you know AI is going to take over your job?
-Some rando, probably
Would you believe it's been nearly a year since moving to Bloomington? I can barely believe it. I feel like a lot has happened in the past year, more than other years that have passed.
I think when you struggle with depression and anxiety, it can be really easy to sort of write off your experience and let your brain convince you that you don't really accomplish all that much. I'd like to stop letting my brain make me think that.
Do you ever wonder why you want to do things, but just end up stuck? Why you have this desire to be creative, and to do difficult and cool things and never follow through? Or is that just me?
This past year (2024) I spent the first 7 months writing about what I was doing, and actively working on my health, fitness, and learning goals. Then August rolled around, I moved, my mom had a health scare, and I couldn't seem to get myself back on track.
Don’t waste four hours like I did 😭. If you're using a private package off of an NPM paid account, you need to specify the registry value in your .npmrc. The generated one won't work.
The more ya know.
Well, it’s been a few months now, hasn’t it? The past few have been nothing short of utterly chaotic.
At the beginning of August, my mom ended up in the hospital for eight days and was susequently diagnosed with Myasthenia Gravis, a rare autoimmune disorder where your body attacks your muscles at the point that they recieve nerve impulses.
Last Friday I moved out of my apartment in D.C. I have known I was moving since last March, so it shouldn't have come as a shock, but still, I find myself caught off guard by the things that I've been feeling since then.
If you know me, you know that I am an introvert. I spend a lot of my time doing things alone. And for the most part, I like it that way. I walk my dog, listen to audiobooks, read, watch TV, or write code. But the thing is, it didn't used to be this way.
Rhode Island. For the end of May/beginning of June, I was in Rhode Island. I went on a few hikes, and started teaching Moose how to hang out on a paddle board. I had a great time!
I am burnt out.
Admittedly, I am happy. I am spending more time outside, I am working out consistently, I have been reading more books, and I am doing all the things that science says a functional human should do.
This is so very delayed and for that I am sorry! I was traveling again at the very end of the month and it completely slipped my mind.
So here I present May, a sports filled month of sports.
And with that, April is all wrapped up. A busy month for sure, but with our upcoming move, it's bound to be even more busy up until that point.
A (99% Total) Eclipse of the Heart. Andrea and I went to my family's house in Ohio to view the eclipse. We got a sick view, and even sicker glasses. Space is cool as shit.
The experiment below is based on tips and tricks that have worked for my flavor of ADHD. I am not a medical professional, so take all of these with a grain of salt.
Let me start this off by saying that I am not formally diagnosed with ADHD. I’ve had symptoms all my life, and my Dad and brother have both been formally diagnosed and medicated for it. I was your typical presentation in girls, so my parents had a hard time recognizing that I had it too. I have given myself a self-diagnosis.
March utterly flew by and honestly I feel like I haven’t had a second to catch my breath. I had a lot going on, so we will jump right to it.
My partner and I started the month by going on a mini Midwest college tour. She applied to grad school in Psychology this cycle, and got into a few schools. We toured all them but ultimately, Indiana University was the best fit for our little family.
For those who may live on under a rock, the US House of Reps voted overwhelmingly in favor of a bill last week that would require the parent company of TikTok, ByteDance, to sell the company or face a ban in the United States.
As a regular user of the app and someone skeptical of large organizations with access to extreme amounts of user data, I have mixed feelings on this.
I am in a constant battle with my brain to do the bare minimum. Brush my teeth? Battle. Shower? Battle. Exercise? Battle. Make lunch? Battle.
My existence as a person with ADHD isn’t inherently harder than those without. It’s just a different kind of struggle.
I'm beginning a part of my life where I am about to be very busy for the next upcoming months. My long time partner has been accepted to a Ph.D. program, and I am beyond excited for her.
However, that meant we spent the end of February and beginning of March traveling around the midwest visiting schools. Thus, I've been unable to get out this update. So anyways, here it is. Better late than never!
If you read my article about my reasons for moving my site, you know that one of the habits I am trying to create for 2024 is to create more and consume less. One of the actions I’ve taken is subscribing to RSS feeds that I care about, instead of mindlessly scrolling news feeds on twitter, Apple News, etc.
I haven’t missed that habit, and it really has limited the amount of stupid things that I find myself sucked into reading.
In an effort to keep my new writing and creating habit going, I am going to attempt to do a ‘wrap up’ at the end of the each month. Without further ado, here is what happened in January.
In case you’ve not seen, I’ve moved from my previous domain, emmacampbell.dev, to this new domain spooky.blog. With moving, I have
At the beginning of January I decided to hell with resolutions. Many people will look at that statement and think something along the lines of “What? Why?”, so here is what I am thinking.
Many people hit January 1st and decide that they are going to change everything about their lives. And most of those many people will fail. There’s a couple reasons that I can think of to explain that.
Everyone and their mothers always makes a goal to read more books at the start of every given year. Last year, I read more than I hoped, but on the previous version of my site had a tracker that was pretty tedious to use.
I want to display my book reading superiority so that everyone can see (a not-so-humble brag, if you will).
This website is moving! Please visit spooklore.com to find me again :)
Like all web developers I have a plethora of owned domains saved for a rainy day. One of those domains -- spooklore.com has really spoken to me.
I was recently promoted at Hugo Health from Software Engineer I (the equivalent of a junior-level position at the company) to Software Engineer II. Being a part of a small startup has allowed me to grow and become more knowledgable quicker than I could have ever imagined, but the days of imposter syndrome still loom and it's honestly difficult to overcome the feeling that you do not have the knowledge needed to tackle the problems presented to you. I find myself worrying constantly about what I don't know.
My recent promotion has had me reflecting on where I started, where I hope to go, and what I still struggle with as a developer - whether that be technically or mentally.
In my time at Hugo Health, when I am not working on data operations and scaling, I have been helping to facilitate a major refactor of our systems. A huge part of this is the way that we manage our packages.
Admittedly, the way we used to do things was a bit of a mess. Most everyone there would probably agree with that sentiment. So, we decided to change things up. We had a few things we wanted to accomplish with these changes.
If you've ever viewed an article on Medium, you'll notice that the preview gives an estimated "read time". This feature is easily to implement using the reading-time node package and our existing contentlayer configuration. Begin by installing reading-time.
We will add reading time by adding a new computed field to our post model and defining the type for ReadingTime.
April 14, 2024: Please be advised that since writing this, Planetscale has shut down its hobby tier 😭
Adding metrics to a post is both a fun coding challenge as well as a nice to have. We are going to utilize a PlanetScale database, which has a generous "Hobby" plan. This plan includes
While the digital world around us moves onward and upward into the 21st century, the healthcare space is seemingly stuck. This past year I moved, and had to have ankle surgery for a chronic injury that I had spent the last 12 years dealing with in three different states.1
Previously, we talked through the choices behind the tech stack used to build my developer blog. The step towards building a functional blog is wiring up contentlayer, an SDK for transforming unstructured content into type-safe json data structures. Contentlayer is a breeze to use, but in case you're stuck, here is how I set it up.
Installing contentlayer is a fairly straighforward process.
Almost every developer dreams of creating a stylish and functional blog for sharing their journeys about learning in tech. I want to quickly talk through my design choices for the beginning stages of building my own blog.
The key part to this all working nicely is being able to manage content well. As a developer who's already familiar with markdown, the next logical step would be using MDX to write all content.