The publishing now formats links, but still doesn’t show images, and that is ok, balanced, for writing.

But I don’t need images for writing, so I’m going to leave it like this. Use this second document as a slower loading second section in my homepage’s Writing section. I’m sure I’m going to get ‘haters’, ‘trolls’, and cynicism but am probably more worried about my closest relatives reading me than someone across the globe. That’s a character trait I must bear with for now. In the past year I self-assessed myself being towards the edge of a spectrum when it comes to gracefully changing the target of my focus and attention. I won’t name it, I don’t like carrying ‘tags’, but I am certainly not in the comfort zone when it comes to sharing or showing my work, what I do, what I think about or who I am, with other people, unless they show some interest and I can expect some “approval” in return. So this is quite a jump to even be writing here again, like it is social media day-1. I know that is not the case. Who reads things now anyway? Everybody is prompting, or passively thinking about all of the things, that -besides not fully grasping-, have automated to passively be doing our work. Hm. Did we loose control yet? No that is not what I started to write about here, but is all relevant to why and how I write.

One thing at a time, while I’ve been learning to code since around 2016 in anticipation of of daughter being born in 2017, , writing, sharing and helping professionals. I can consider my coding journey has reached a new stage and from around a year back I’ve been feeling that urge and preparing myself for it. It is a new stage. New times, new problems, new challenges and above all, a new streamlined set of small challenges to face daily, coming our way.

I’m not talking about global geo-politics here, or not yet anyway. I mean the simple type of small daily life-work challenges and keeping a sound mind in general, though the professional and personal realm.

Things are distinctively different than just a decade ago, and the redundancy here is unintended, it is simply real. I have long been feeling a real need to jump out of the wardrobe here and do more of what I’ve always loved, starting with writing and applying everything I’ve learned and my daily duties as a post modern third class back office saavi from the later margin and male manifestation of a prodigious generation-X - we thrived in the 90’s-.

I made myself a spreadsheet to list my main writing areas and topics, it is quite extended → Shift+Pasting directly from the spreadsheet to here →

Who I am · Who am I? · What I do · Digital vs physical · Coaching · What I think about questions Writing · Journaling · Photography · Art · AI · Productivity Tourism · Trips · Cities · Experiences Local development · Cities History · Traditions · Culture · Cities Gardens · Plants Local food · What I think about questions

I’ll make it easier for you to know me, by providing a bit more context, starting with some of my perceived personality traits, in a positive key. I am usually restless, yet slow thinker, very empathetic, self-motivated to high energies but not always clear ends.

My first professional training was that of a 24/7 military-influenced family business, all round assistant, in the construction sector, industrial flooring and global stoneware sector. This took me all over Spain and beyond by road, driving my late Spanish step-father from site to site, meeting to meeting, or on my own to do errands. I did an average of around 3000km a week, but mostly on the road, the waters were calm so long as the speed gauge was over 150km/h. I was privileged to get a first hand transmission of many things from my Spanish step-father, including his passion and vivid narrative, from “Don Quijote de La Mancha”, and a fond analysis of the mountain tops, castles, forts, major historical battle fields, and even insights into the geological formations from Granada to Mecca, from him. His geopolitical statements were not all the way off it seems, even today.

My actual father, he parted back to the UK, when I was around age 4. I did meet him numerous times, and received what may seem to be little from him, highly symbolic for me, obviously. In fact I will be writing directly about him, my father (British) because during the aftermath of Covid and my entire work/business life I received a hand typed manuscript from a fellow friend who has known him for all these years. He gave me “a manuscript”, it is a whole book, so I am transcribing it. Slowly but steadily, I may be sharing a bit of that here also: The Book on The (Arabic) Letters. I’m not sure what format I’ll be publishing this to, but will be sure to share some advances on it here for now.

I have a weak-spot for Google AppsScript.

Amidst learning to code and finding my way of survival into this post-modern era, over the past decade, I have developed a whole galaxy of custom code and low friction office solutions far beyond the specifics of my own business needs. Into the lands of ‘generic solutions” as a full stack developer, I’m currently building my own full stack node js multi-purpose “boiler plate”, and using it across two or three different projects, each to be launched at their own pace and time.

I started around 2015, using the free Google Workspaces over a couple of specific Google Business accounts. I used Google Sheets as the repository, and AppsScript as my universal office automations stack. Particularly over the past year or two, I’ve made a special place for a pattern or mind-set I developed myself, this being: “Google Docs as an interface”. I found I use them differently from convention.

The now “traditional” cloud based Application Programing Interfaces that revolutionised our lives and the global economy, supporting popular portals, lke Amazon, Youtube or Facebook, have successfully made “computing” more available for a whole generation of communication engineers and self-learned “coders”. PHP, MySQL, NodeJs, React, ORMs, backend, front-end, server-client, processes, data flows, layers, contexts, API interfaces, logic modularity, layering and isolation of “concerns” and now, also LLM, AI, available to “fill in logic gaps” on every step. We are undoubtedly living a new revolution. However, we also face the challenge of keeping up, to a faster pace, and not losing our own ancestral wisdom, human needs, nor running humanity in the process either. We certainly do need to find our place and learn to position ourselves, both professionally and regarding our own personal wellness, in these sophisticated, highly tech demanding new times.

Where I am going is that for many daily small or large, repetitive business or professional needs, a simple Google Doc has nothing to envy over an expensive and complex custom built web application, and you can also use sophisticated and dynamic web application patterns, using a google document as an interface.

Whether it is for taking a simple Minimum Viable Product fast to validate it on the real market, or making internal tools to speed up department procedures - repetitive processes, schedule marketing emails, generate leads, respond to form inputs, generate quotation documents, or payment confirmations - a simple and free Google Workspaces with the right AppsScript framework and patterns, can become a full blown business suite and automations engine today.

Scaling up to a dedicated full-stack web application from there is always easier than starting from a blank page. I’m using Nodejs technology and React based stacks mostly for my own Web Application projects, after exploring options from NestJS and TypeORM as a full backend (https://api.alandalus-experience.com). The line of classical backend/business logic server vs frontend/client interfaces, has specially blurred now with the new hybrid NextJS/NuxtJS environments (https://alanza-coop-v12-44131795481.europe-west1.run.app/). These are exciting new industry breakthroughs, that combined with us all using AI to help us in most of what we do, are also viable in production time and what I call, thought to production friction.

Right now, part of this new artisan HTML website that you are reading right now, is an experiment. Me building a new static HTML template - one I can use or extend to deliver web projects from- while exploring integration options from the right Google Workspace custom AppsScript interface endpoints. It is actually nearly just as good as my NextJS Saas style web application and the rich features I have there, for many business needs, just that it is faster and the environment is steady, ready to build without investing months or thousands, into a fully dedicated WebApplication.

A few months back, around April, I made another Google Docs based script I called specifically that “Dry-AI”, and, well it basically pipelined prompts through documents like a charm, using the documents as a surface, like here but to generate content, not to write it onto a website. Hasta pronto.

As per language… It took me about two weeks to build this website from scratch, but mostly it was the writing that slowed me down. While I did use the’ old Gipetto -Gpt- for coding, it gave me some headaches to get all of the forms kind of decent and onto my spreadsheets, like I like them. From there I can plug them into my calendar and then I can get notifications for any bookings, or trip dates that I’m expecting or need to work on!

Where I was going to before rambling… is that I will translate it, to Spanish, one section at a time, probably without ‘ai’, because I find it writes like an enciclopedia, or maybe it’s just me, I find it dry. Ah! A few months back, around April, I made another Google Docs based script I called specifically that “Dry-AI”, and, well it basically pipelined prompts through documents like a charm, using the documents as a surface, like here but to generate content, not to write it onto a website. Hasta pronto.

…is that now I am a copy paste away from, sharing

any campaign, looking at it from an “already published” context or frame of mind. Before taking it from there, moving my writing through different platforms, pipelines, channels or feeds.

Let me know if you would like me to dedicate 90 minutes to simply showing you, a few different ways I use Google Docs, which I’m sure few people have thought about.

You can 👉🏼Check Our My Digital Literacy Collection Here