Metaphysics
3 June, 2019
4 minute read
Work
I spent this past week settling into waking up at 5š and planning various personal projects/goals. Currently at my internship Iām working on GiftYa. So far Iāve mostly done frontend work but Iāve moved on to some smaller backend tasks. Getting experience in QA last year really opened my eyes to potential bugs as I work which has made me a better developer..at least, I like to think soš My goal this summer is to work up to a level where Iām able to tackle larger features on my own.
Outside of my internship Iāve taken some baby steps toward working on PlayRight by beginning to compile handwritten guitar tabs for songs that I know are accurate. One of my biggest frustrations with guitar tab sites like Ultimate Guitar is that you have to sort through a lot of wrong tabs to find the right one. Often times even the highest rated tab for a song has bits and pieces left out or are just plain wrong. Iāve also started to reconsider my design/prototype for PlayRight. I havenāt touched it since finishing my āMobile Apps: Design & Prototypingā class this past semester but I think itās important for that to be near perfect before I begin to style screens and develop core features.
Dev Work
Even though Iāve decided to work primarily on the design before developing core features of PlayRight, Iām still working through setting up the Spotify API to work with Expo/AWS. AWS itself has a lot of things to learn so Iām incrementally learning about services like API Gateway and Lambda. I might have been too ambitious thinking I could work with APIs before learning anything about API Gateway or Lambda but š¤·āāļøš¤Ŗ Articles like this one by Josh Spicer are really helping me understand how everything should work together. Besides PlayRight work, I decided to help my girlfriend by putting together a site of her own using Gatsby. To get organized working on everything Iāve started using Trello boards, Notion, and Figma for mocking up design ideas quickly.
Reading
- Books
I recently picked up Essays and Aphorisms by Arthur Schopenhauer and Existentialism is a Humanism by Jean-Paul Sartre. Schopenhauer focuses on metaphysics while Sartre was a key figure of existentialist philosophy in the 20th century. Metaphysics and existentialism as philosophies fit well together. Metaphysics concerns itself with the nature of existence and being itself driven by a certain kind of uncontrollable will (we donāt make our choices, theyāre made for us) while existentialism focuses on the individual as developed through oneās own will (while not entirely free will). Schopenhauer believes that the default state of being is to restlessly strive for things (a new job, a new car, etc.). Even though these things might not necessarily be what fulfills us in the long run, this seems to be what most people are driven by subconciously. Metaphysics can be thought of as an umbrella under which the philosophy of existentialism and many others exist. In fact, in Aristotleās Metaphysics he asserts that:
āThe investigation of the truth is in one way hard, in another easy. An indication of this is found in the fact that no one is able to attain the truth adequately, while, on the other hand, no one fails entirely, but everyone says something true about the nature of all things, and while individually they contribute little or nothing to the truth, by the union of all a considerable amount is amassed.ā
Aristotle also believes that with the understanding of metaphysics came the ability to philosophize and reason about other niche areas of life:
āFor it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize.ā
Quote Iām diggingā¦
āMan can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.ā ~ Arthur Schopenhauer