The Daily Prime: Docker Experiment And A Source Of Daily Inspiration
Last month, I published a blog post on my journey from complete Docker noob to Docker novice running a Docker host on DigitalOcean with Nginx, Node.js, DataDog logs, DogStatsD, and free LetsEncrypt SSL certificates. That was a huge milestone for me; but, it was just the beginning of my Docker education. There's still so much to learn. And, like many people, I learn best when working towards a goal. As such, I wanted to turn that learning experience into a real web-application with which I can continue to experiment. Introducing: The Daily Prime - a super simple web-application that offers up a daily reminder that we can be better people if we can just remember to try.
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View the DailyPrime.me code on GitHub.
I'm putting this code up on GitHub for anyone to see in case anyone has any constructive feedback about what I am doing and how I am doing it. Or, perhaps even wants to help out. Of course, since this is a learning experiment, none of the code in the repository should be considered "Best Practice" - it should only be considered the best that I am currently capable of architecting.
Docker aside, the idea behind The Daily Prime stems from a wonderful TED Talk by Alain de Botton called "Atheism 2.0". In the talk, Botton argues that there are many aspects of the religious world that would be a tremendous value-add for the secular world. One of these facets is the explicit structure and the concept of repetition as a learning tool.
The other things that religions do is to arrange time. All the major religions give us calendars. What is a calendar? A calendar is a way of making sure that across the year you will bump into certain very important ideas. In the Catholic chronology, Catholic calendar, at the end of March you will think about St. Jerome and his qualities of humility and goodness and his generosity to the poor. You won't do that by accident; you will do that because you are guided to do that. Now we don't think that way. In the secular world we think, "If an idea is important, I'll bump into it. I'll just come across it." Nonsense, says the religious world view. Religious view says we need calendars, we need to structure time, we need to synchronize encounters. This comes across also in the way in which religions set up rituals around important feelings.
As a software engineer, this is completely obvious to me when it comes to programming - I only get better at the methods I practice; and, the code that I don't write very often is the code I tend to forget. So, the idea that such repetition would be conducive to self-improvement on a human level is not too surprising.
That said, remembering to practice at being a better person is rarely easy without structure. As such, I am hoping that The Daily Prime affords me some of that structure - that it can be the way that I start my day - that is can prime my psyche and course-correct my view of the world. What I hope is that, through practice, I can approach self-improvement more holistically.
Now, I just need to find the videos that inspire me to be the best Ben I can be.
Oh, and learn some sweet Docker skills along the way!
Reader Comments
Love the idea, Ben - keen to see how it works for me :)
@Glenn,
Thank you, good sir. I only have a few videos in there at the moment. Will be looking to add more as I find them :D