It’s just that, for me, the blogging that’s actually interesting is the blogging that very much is not a trade and very much an avocation or hobby.

People instead of brands, basically. Along that line, the linked Winnie Lim post about normalizing being a whole person also resonated with me:

Yes pls, normalise being true to your hobbies and interests and your whole self – also why I refuse to have dozens of different instagram accounts and websites for each of my interests. Everything I do is intertwined in some way and I can’t slice myself cold into separate slices.

We have to write about anything and everything to widen each other’s narrow perspectives, to express the amazing amount of detail that reality has, to normalise being whole persons, that having a wide variety of interests can be a good thing, because everything will ultimately feed into who we are and what we create.

Something good for me to remember.

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Notes:

• Before now, this site was using a PHP CMS called Blackbullet that I wrote in 2013. I wanted to simplify by getting rid of the PHP dependency and serving up static HTML files instead.
• I initially started the project as a Go app in 2021, abandoned it shortly thereafter, and then picked it up again this past December with some new ideas on how to implement it. Also switched to Node.
• I wrote my own rather than using 11ty or Jekyll or another existing engine because, well, I wanted to.
• Right now it rebuilds the site from scratch each time and takes 8–12 seconds. Compilation is fast enough that I’m probably going to leave it this way for now, rather than adding support for incremental builds.
• No plan at this time to release Cast as open source.

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A quick retrospective: publishing issues was fine (the structure helped, for example), but for a personal blog I’m now less convinced that it’s the right fit. Looking forward to posting more freely and frequently.

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January 23, 2001. It’s possible I started it before that day, but that’s the first reference to it I’ve found in my journals.

Tinkering on the site all these years has been a delight. Truly one of my favorite activities.

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Today was my last day at Cedar (formerly OODA Health before the acquisition), and on Monday I start a new job at Hologram.

I’m finally getting around to writing Cast, the new backend engine for this site. The plan is to go full static and deploy via Render. Also planning to move my personal apps over. While I’m still probably a couple months away from having everything migrated, I’m so, so looking forward to not maintaining a personal server anymore. (It’s fun, sure, and I’ve learned a lot, but it’s stressful — yesterday’s Let’s Encrypt root certificate expiration bit me thanks to an old OpenSSL version, for example — and it’s no longer something I want to spend time on for personal projects.)

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(My reasoning for including the tags and putting them at the top, by the way, is to make it a little easier to see at a glance what a post is about and whether you want to skip it.)

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Outside of art, my project time lately has primarily been swallowed up by some internal tooling changes. I alluded to this back in June, though the plan changed along the way. Rather than merging all those apps into one behemoth conglomerate, I decided it would be better (along at least a few axes) to follow the Unix philosophy and stick with smaller tools that do one thing well. Which conveniently lines up with the set of tools I’ve already built. Fancy that.

Arc is (was) my notes app, written using FastAPI. I wanted an app that felt more a wiki, and I wanted to move it to Django (easier to maintain, considering most of my other tools are also in Django). And I didn’t really like the name anymore. Thus Codex was born. Heretically, I built it using hardly any JavaScript — just a bit for keyboard shortcuts and another bit for the autosuggest when linking to another page. Everything else uses plain old HTML forms.

In fact, it was so liberating and fun that I plowed onward and decided to ditch Vinci (my internal blog/notebook app) and build a new app, Leaf, using the same technique; the only JS it uses is for keyboard shortcuts. It’s simpler, easier to maintain (I think? it’s still early on), and in a way it feels more in line with the grain of the web.

One other thing I did differently with both apps was to wait to write any CSS until after the functionality was all in place. It was disconcerting and delightful, building something with bare browser styles, and it certainly helped me focus on functionality first rather than getting distracted by layout.

Conclusion: while I doubt I would ever build apps at work this way, this old-school mode was invigorating and absolutely worth it for these personal projects.

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