As happens more often; I got engaged in a discussion on Reddit which revolved around drug use, identity, culture and mental health issues. It provoked certain reactions, which became the inspiration for this blog post.

The initial comment which triggered this discussion was one in which I suggested that the combination of habitual marijuana use and personally identifying drug use with ones personality would be a sign something is ‘amiss’. The reactions in the discussion which ensued could roughly be categorized in the following three categories;

1. “There’s nothing amiss with weed”
2. “Everyone identifies themselves with addictions all the time”
3. “The idea that habitual drug use harmful at all is bullshit”

It’s the latter of this one which I instinctively would be quickest to dismiss, but which at the same time is the one which would warrant a more thorough reaction. In this post I’m providing more background to these three points.

Roughly eight years ago I made my entrance in a family which I have gotten to know from the inside out. Not only this, but if there’s one thing I have ever truly hated in my life, it is this specific family. Though by now I do not really hold a grudge against anyone specifically, I still resent the whole family for their toxic, narcissistic and authoritarian social dynamics.

The impact I have had on the whole family is enormous. My sole presence has triggered a reaction which is difficult to fathom, and has pulled a thread which lead to the unraveling of this family. Imagine hating a family so vigorously that destroying it is the only way for reconciliation. That’s where I came from.

As I write this, this unraveling is a process that is still ongoing. Though I’ll describe this whole process and the underlying mechanics, I have no doubt about whether sharing this post will hinder this process in any way. If this post makes any impact at all, I suppose this may act as a catalyst.

If I had to pick a song which pretty much resonates with the way my life goes it’d be this one; starts of easy, but significantly increases with complexity and intensity as time goes by.

A few days ago I found this question on Reddit in which someone asked about whether to put any data processing logic on the client side or on the server side of an application. For someone starting out with web development, or just simply any generic structure in which data is pulled from a server, choices like this can be daunting. Additionally, the results of picking one choice over the other are not always immediately clear. Over the course of several years I have made an incredible amount of bad choices with regard to front and backend structuring, which has led me to an understanding of some best practices which will make your life significantly easier, and therefore this post;

To help myself stay sane in a world of continuous deployment and be able to effectively debug strange situations I wanted to tag every version of my app with version information, such as the commit hash, commit message, build date and more. My setup is one where I run an react app created using the create-react-app CLI tool, deployed within a Docker container which is built using Docker Hub (using the Autobuild feature).