When you have a problem you need to work on, what keeps you from working on it are the unknowns about the problem. If you just push yourself for 5 minutes to write them down, write down all your thoughts and ramblings about them, soon you realize that a glimpse of a solution appears.

I love solving problems, and building Algiz gives me so much joy. Admittedly, after a day full of work, and spending time with my beautiful family, I rarely can find the motivation for more brain work. I usually end up doing something mindless, like wasting hours away watching YouTube or Netflix. But whenever I force myself to write down a problem and think on it for 5 minutes (with a timer if I am really not feeling it), I can get right back into that problem solving mindset. All of a sudden, those hours that would have been wasted are then actually used productively.

Yesterday, I got stuck trying to find a way to send files to a newly-created EC2 instance on AWS and running a few commands through Python in another remote machine. I left the problem unsolved partially because I wanted to have something to work on today (but mostly because I was already quite tired). When I sat down to work on it, I quickly found myself either scrolling LinkedIn or playing bullet chess on lichess.org (my go-to procrastination method). Here is what I wrote down:

- The biggest problem is authentication but I think it can be solved with creating a key pair and then downloading the key pair, then I can SCP the files into the machine
- How do we then run the commands necessary to start the backend?
- How do we make sure everything works correctly?
- Or better yet, create a single key and assign it to all machines at machine creation time and then use that key to authenticate into the machine, run a bunch of commands (through subprocess?), make sure everything runs well and exit
- Where do I store the key for secure access?

I ended up going a different route than this but what’s important is that I got my problem-solving engine going.