I've just been through three years of lung cancer surgeries and treatments (chemotherapy, etc.). I didn't expect to survive, but I have. I thought about death nearly every day. I made peace with dying. A lot of the people in the chemo clinics were in their last days and headed to hospice. The one takeaway from the experience was this: Don't waste time. Death will visit you eventually, so prepare yourself. Then spend every other minute living. Work on that bucket list early in your life when you are healthy and can enjoy it. Peace out.

For the prototype of my project, I am using DreamCompute from DreamHost. I pay under $40 per month. I'm using Rust with the actix_web crate to build out the API, packaging it in a Docker container, and using Nginx for routing and reverse proxying. MySql is the DB. So far, so good.

I'm 69.5 and I took on Rust this year. I approached it as a 30+ year C/C++/C# programmer. It does have quite the learning curve. Repetition was vital for me in my journey. I watched endless YouTube videos by different creators on a single aspect of Rust, say "borrowing," to understand it. I also used Manning courses for some. Some creators are better than others, of course. "Let's Get Rusty" on YouTube was my go-to for learning the rust-lang book in a structured fashion. Slowly, it jelled. Five months in, I can use the language, but I'm nowhere near an expert. The r/rust community on Reddit has also been great for helping me get unstuck from some of the idioms of the language. It was a lot of hours, but thinking back, learning C was as difficult. I'm glad I invested the time and suffered through the difficulties. It's a splendid language.

The Weepies and Crooked Still. I make fewer coding errors with baroque strings vibrating my gray brain. Oh, yeah.