2025.03.15 aka Jack of All Trades

Took a break from Bmore Today to explore an idea I've been sitting on: an app or site to make hobby-hopping easier. I love learning and new experiences, so why not build something to help discover more of what's out there?

Waxing Poetics

We've been inundated with multiverse content these past few years. A lot of it feels lazy and cash-grabby, but one of the standouts of the bunch was Everything Everywhere All At Once. I think one of the coolest ideas presented was "verse-jumping", the ability to tap into the skills and knowledge of other versions of yourself.

I think the idea resonated with me because of the curiosity I've held since I was a kid. I never had a favorite school subject, I liked all of them. When I first learned about college, I imagined it as a place where everyone wanted to learn, a Valhalla of knowledge. I was convinced I’d walk out a doctor-archaeologist-astronaut. But reality set in: most people pick one major, one career path, and stick with it.

That never sat right with me.

There are so many things to learn, explore, and experience; why limit ourselves?

My favorite line from Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler is

All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you.

So I've always wanted to touch everything, to contribute, to experiment, to fail, to grow, to discover in what ways I change. One of the ways I do this is through hobby hopping. I could just be justifying my ADHD 😂, but I truly believe in the T-shaped learning model, applied not just to work but to life in general (maybe more upside down histogram shaped 🤔).

JOAT (Jack Of All Trades)

Like most of my projects, the idea of JOAT starts as a personal tool first. I always build for myself first. What do I need for this to be useful? So here's what I'm thinking:

• A list of hobbies to choose from
• A way to randomly discover or search for hobbies
• A space to document progress (photos, videos, notes to start probably)
• A way to find relevant communities (maybe subreddits to start) to get started faster

Today's Work

Today, I worked on a script to collect the hobbies. There used to be a Wikipedia page listing hobbies, but I think it was deleted because the concept of a "hobby" is so broad. Fair enough.

I did find an alternative source though. The script can:

• Search through all available pages of the source
• Extract and store hobby names
• Save them to a JSON file

Next step? Setting up a PostgreSQL database with:

• A table for hobbies
• A table for page hashes (to avoid redundant scraping)

Once that’s in place, I’ll start working on the UI. Maybe set up another React Native project with Expo.

Final Thoughts

Curiosity doesn’t have to be a one-time thing. It should be a way of life.

JOAT is my way of trying to give that philosophy a shape.

We'll see where this goes.