Concept Spanish wine, created in 1996, is designed to enhance cocktail experiences. The product line includes four distinct wines, each...

Hey there. It has been a minute since my last post. I was semi-recently tagged by Zach Leatherman to (optionally) participate in this year's Blog Questions Challenge. I had planned on doing it then. But life really hit hard as we entered this year and it has not let up. Energy dedicated to my personal webspace has been non-existent. I am tired. Hopefully this post can help shake off some of the rust, bring me back to writing and sharing with you lovely folks. I won't be tagging anyone to do this challenge. However, if you're inspired to write your own after reading mine, I'd love for you to share it with me. Why did you start blogging in the first place? Blogging has always been a part of my web experience. Earliest I can remember is building my band a GeoCities website back in high school. I'd share short passages about new song ideas, how last night's show went, stuff like that. I also briefly had a Xanga blog running. My memory is totally faded on what exactly I wrote in there—I'm not eager to dig up high school feelings either—but fairly certain all of those entries are just lost digital history. Having an "online journal" was such a fresh idea at the time. Sharing felt more natural and real before the social media platforms took over. [blows raspberry] I've completely dated myself and probably sound like "old man yells at cloud" right now. Anyway, I pretty much stopped blogging for a while after high school. I turned my efforts back to pen on paper, keeping journals of lyrics, thoughts, and feelings mostly to myself. My dev-focused blogging that you may be familiar with really only spans the last decade, give or take a couple years. What platform are you using to manage your blog and why? At the moment and the forseeable future, I'm using 11ty. I published a short post about migrating to 11ty back in 2021. I still feel the same sentiments and still admire those same people. And many new community friends as well! Have you blogged on other platforms before? I've definitely used WordPress but I can't remember what the heck I was even blogging about during that time. Then I switched to just writing posts directly in HTML files and FTP'ing them up to some server somewhere. Pretty silly in retrospect, but boy did I feel alive. How do you write your posts? Always via laptop, never on my phone. I manage posts in markdown files, push them up to a GitHub repo and let that automatically redeploy my site on Netlify. Editing content is done in VSCode. I've debated switching to some lightweight CMS, connecting to Notion or Obsidian, but why introduce any more complexity and mess with what works fine for me? When do you feel most inspired to write? Typically I'll write up a post about something new I discovered while on my wild coding escapades, whether at work or in my free time. If I have trouble finding solutions to my particular problem on the world wide webs, I'm even more inclined to post about it. Most of my ideas are pursued on weekends, but I've had some early morning or late night weekday sessions. What I'm trying to say is that anytime is a good time for blogging. It's like pizza when it's on a bagel. Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft? It depends. If I had been writing for a long period of time, I find it best to take a breather before publishing. When I feel ready, I'll post and share with a small group for feedback, find grammatical errors. Then I eventually add it to whatever social channels feel right. Used to be Twitter, but straight up screw that garbage temple. I'll likely post on Bluesky, toot on Mastodon. Other times I'll slap a new post on this site and not share it on any socials. Let the RSS feeds do their magic. What's your favorite post on your blog? I don't know if I have a favorite. Can I love them all equally? Well, besides that CSS Marquee one. Damn that blog post for becoming so popular. Any future plans for your blog? Once things settle down in life, I think I'll be ready for a redesign. I had a blast building the current version inspired by Super Mario Wonder. Until then? More blogging. It won't be super soon, but I do have a few zesty article ideas percolating in this old, tired brain.

I recently finished Carlo Rovelli’s book “The Order of Time” and, of course, had a few web-adjacent thoughts come to mind. Who says lessons from physics can’t be applied to making software? (I know, nobody is actually dying on that hill.) A Weakness of Being Data-Driven Being data-driven is the most scientific way of building products? Hold that thought: The ability to understand something before it’s observed is at the heart of scientific thinking. If you can only imagine that which you can observe, understand, and measure, you’re limiting yourself. If you can only believe that which you can observe, then you’ll only ever understand that which you can see. Abstract thought can anticipate by centuries hypotheses that find use — or confirmation — in scientific inquiry. Beware the Prejudice of the Self-Evident The things that seemed self-evident to us were really no more than prejudices. The earth is flat. The sun revolves around the earth. These were mistakes determined by our perspective. There are undoubtedly more things that seem self-evident now, but as we progress in experience and knowledge we will realize that what seems self-evident is merely a prejudice of our perspective given our time and place in the world. There’s always room to be wrong. Children grow up and discover that the world is not as it seemed from within the four walls of their homes. Humankind as a whole does the same thing. Asking the Wrong Questions When we cannot formulate a problem with precision, it is often not because the problem is profound; it’s because the problem is false. Incredibly relevant to building software. If you can’t explain a problem (and your intended solution), it’s probably not a problem. Objectivity Is Overrated When we do science, we want to describe the world in the most objective way possible. We try to eliminate distortions and optical illusions deriving from our point of view. Science aspires to objectivity, to a shared point of view about which it is possible to be in agreement. This is admirable, but we need to be wary about what we lose by ignoring the point of view from which we do the observing. In its anxious pursuit of objectivity, science must not forget that our experience of the world comes from within. Every glance that we cast toward the world is made from a particular perspective. I love this idea. Constantly striving for complete and total objectivity is like trying to erase yourself from existence. As Einstein showed, point of view is everything in a measurement. Your frame of reference is important because it’s yours, however subjective, and you cannot escape it. What we call “objectivity” may merely be the interplay between different subjective perspectives. As Matisse said, “I don’t paint things. I paint the relationship between things.” Email · Mastodon · Bluesky

The land spoke to us; it spoke our language. We are, and always will be, a part of it. It...

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