Building the Hollow Deck
This month will be a little different. I have been working heavily on a project within a project. The novel I am writing deals with the problems of the centralization of power by way of technology and data ownership. In this world, characters express their resistance through open-source, self-sufficient, local-first tools and technologies. I won't go too deep into this, but Maggie Appleton has a great article on the subject: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers.
All that to say, I felt this urge to be a part of that resistance, and to do some of the things that my characters were doing. I also wanted to be more productive and focused when I was writing. No matter what—even with Wifi disabled—there was always something else to do, something else to pull me away when I tried to write on my PC or my iPad.
Enter the writerDeck.
I am not a developer by trade, but I will happily wear the hat of Appleton's "barefoot developer." I have become more comfortable with the command line over the years, and this seemed like the perfect environment for me to write. No desktop. No UI. No distractions. Only me, the text, and just a tad of automation.
The following is a draft document of this process. What hardware I am using (for now), the software architecture, and how I put it all together. If you're down to get moderately technical, then check out the start of my journey here or the entire repo.
Thanks for reading!