Why did you start blogging in the first place?

In its most recent form, I restarted public writing out of a reluctant acknowledgement that sharing my thoughts is something I do actually enjoy.

Years ago, I ran a dedicated, regularly-updated link blog with occasional long-form pieces. It was mostly focused on design and technology. I really enjoyed contributing to it, initially. By the standards of the time it was successful: traffic was growing regularly—people noticed. And eventually I didn’t like that people had noticed, so I stopped doing it. Shutting it down was reactionary—I’ll admit—but I think I’d reached a place where I had offered up too much of my inner life for individuals I’d never met to inspect and push back on. I was also still partially-closeted back then, so that was a contributing factor.

I don’t quite know how to explain it, but for many years I’ve not felt like writing publicly was a good idea for me. In some part, once we all had places on the internet to write, I didn’t feel like I had much unique thought to contribute. But I also felt unsure that my contributions—meager as they’d be—wouldn’t eventually be twisted and used against me. I suppose that’s simply the risk in doing any of this publicly.

So, why start again? I’ve come around to this idea: the possibility of like-minded individuals finding resonance in one’s thoughts outweighs the potential that someone will intentionally use them against you (I hope).

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?

This site is a recent, new design, but the underpinnings are the same as the previous, much smaller micro site. I built it on a heavily-modified Jekyll install that I’ve essentially frozen in time and keep adding custom bits to. There is no database; it renders static files and any activity on Github triggers builds on the CI server, which automatically push updates to the static web server and CDN. I have a lot more details on my Colophon page, if you’re curious.

Do I recommend this setup to anyone else? No. But as someone who writes code for a living, I think my own site should be something I create—a place where I can experiment with the building blocks of the web (HTML, CSS, and Javascript), and a place with as little opinionated software written by someone else between my code and what you see.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

Yes, my last dedicated blog was built on top of a CMS—a custom, blogging platform I called Trident that I had built early in my Rails days. I didn’t like php and I liked Wordpress even less, so I made my own publishing platform. It worked for me, and worked well. I even hosted a couple other friends’ sites on it for a time, and eventually forked it into a CMS I could use for client work. As with many of my early-days projects, I regret never open sourcing it or pushing it into some form of publicly-available product. I always wanted/intended to, but I wasn’t confident enough in my own engineering skills at the time to take on those responsibilities.

It’s both a joke and a right of passage as a software developer to build your own blogging platform, so I can now check that one off the list. It was fun, but also: good riddance.

How do you write your posts?
For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

Most everything I write these days starts in Bear. From there it generally goes right into a code editor, in HTML markup. If it’s something with photos, or that will need a lot of iteration/editing, it gets its own Git branch to wall it off from the rest of the site until I’m ready to publish it.

Sometimes, as I’m writing, I know exactly what photography or pull quotes I want to pair with a piece and note them in Bear; other times I get the writing into code and then decide what, if anything, to form around it.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

It has been years since I’ve been in a regular practice of writing. I used to maintain a list of ideas, pick one off and flesh it out as I felt moved to do so, establishing a fairly regularly cadence. But, lately, I’ve only found myself writing when I just had no other way to process the idea.

I’d like to get back to a regular practice and hope to, now that I have the new site.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

I used to publish quickly, but I’ve learned that giving things time and space is the best method for me. Some pieces go through drafts/editing over days (usually a week in total)—those are now the “urgent” ones. Others take months. A few I’ve even picked up after years and decided to finally publish (or rework only to put back down). It’s telling to me that some drafts, now many years old, are ones that I’m grateful have never existed publicly.

What are you generally interested in writing about?

I write to process patterns of thinking I see in the world. Sometimes I’m trying to call out things that I think are obvious and don’t seem to be noticed by others, at other times I’m expressing my own lack of understanding. Writing in that latter category likely leaves the reader unsatisfied because I can’t button it up with a tidy or helpful conclusion. But it’s those pieces that usually rattle around in my brain until new bits later fall into place, helping me better understand what I was originally trying to comprehend.

Topics wander, but how we live and interface with each other in the physical world around us and how it all relates to cultural assumptions we mistake as intractable rules seem to be recurring themes. And nerdy computer shit, because: it me.

Who are you writing for?

I’m writing for me, but also for the me that exists who I don’t know. I wouldn’t call it “journaling”, but writing is a method that helps me process the world.

I don’t journal privately, as a practice, so it’s rare that I sit down and write something knowing it will never be released. Whether or not to release it is a decision that I make in the process. When I know there is a potential that even one or two other people might read something, it changes how I think about it. It challenges me to ensure arguments are well-formed and helps me abandon lines of thinking that won’t stand up to scrutiny.

I don’t believe I’m the only person processing the world this way and I worry that tools like generative AI will diminish this practice without many of us noticing we’re losing it.

Ultimately, I don’t expect things I write to be read. They’re for me and I just don’t think I’m so smart as to have a unique opinion that no one else has thought of and needs to be shared. Lightning doesn’t strike that often. But I like the tension that writing in a public forum provides me and that’s what I get out of it. The possibility that something might be read is what shapes the writing.

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

My current favorite is the one I highlight when you first visit my website. It’s about the web. What made the web so attractive to a young kid with a Netscape Navigator and a text editor over 30 years ago remains true today: you can build it, you can control it, and frankly, even if nobody else cares, it’s still yours and that’s something.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

When I set out to design the new site, I briefly dabbled with the idea of updating the platform/infrastructure around it as well, but I didn’t want that additional project to become the excuse as to why I wasn’t done with the new site. Now that the first pass of it is finished, I’m curious about changing a few things:

A CMS would be more convenient for some aspects of the site and Sanity is attractive to me. I’ve also been eyeing SvelteKit. I use Svelte to build the UI for Figma plugins at work and it’s such a wonderful breath of fresh air, as compared to React. It makes writing componentized, state-based frontends fun (I hesitate to say, “again”, because were they ever fun with React?).

As for features, I need a new home for photography. It’s a hobby of mine, and like writing, a way I process the world around me. I made a significant, decade+ investment in Instagram only to have my primary account summarily banned, so I think it’s time I own my photographic home as well.

Tag ’em.

Watching this thing make the rounds, I can’t think of many folks in my orbit that haven’t taken a turn, but I’ll toss it out to Matt and Erica. Matt keeps telling me he’ll get his blog up soon, so consider this some peer pressure. And I don’t know that Erica considers herself a blogger, but she most definitely is a writer and I always enjoy her thoughts on work and life.