Welcome to my site 👋. This is my place on the web to share thoughts, journal about some fun projects, and tell stories.
I've had a couple false starts while trying to become a regular writer on the web. But this is as close as I've come in a very long time. I think that's because I was never really happy with the technology choices I had to quickly get a site running. Years ago, I saw a talk at a conference about the IndieWeb and POSSE which resonated with me. Since then, I knew I didn't want all my writing to be on third-party websites (e.g. Medium, Blogger, Tumblr, etc.). I started a blog by deploying the Wordpress open source project on a hosted server. But 😩 PHP - it wasn't very fun to work on. I'm a big fan of working in JavaScript, so when the Ghost platform came out, I tried again. Despite it being an open source project, I felt like it limited my ability to change much without making a serious investment in learning the codebase.
Update (April 27, 2021): The next paragraph is out of date. I've since transitioned to using Next.js and I love it! I'll make a more meaningful update to this post soon.
I'm doing something different this time. I'm using Gatsby to build the site and hosting it on Now by Zeit. Gatsby starts small, and allows me to be intentional about the parts I want to add over time. It also lets me flex my programming muscles with a more modern set of technologies: React, GraphQL, and TypeScript. Now is extremely well-designed and has the best combination of simplicity, power, and price that I've found. I feel pretty good about this. So good, in fact, that I've shared the source on GitHub.
There's plenty of work to do on this site, but I hope you'll stick around and come visit again. Thanks for stopping by.