Hello Again

January 01, 2025

It’s been a while, huh.

Looking at the archives, I haven’t updated this site in over four years. Quite a bit has changed in that time: an entire US presidential cycle, my three-and-a-half-year job at Microsoft Teams has come and gone, COVID-19 is still here, I had to say goodbye to our kitty, I bought a house, the entire nature of social media has radically changed, we lived through the boom and bust of NFTs, I played way too much Final Fantasy XIV, I fell down the VTuber rabbit hole, I joined my partner’s business running behind-the-scenes operations, I’ve started researching and experimenting with large language models and generative coding, and plenty more. I work at Kickstarter now as a senior iOS engineer, because it seems more vital than ever to build tools for creatives to get funding for projects, which also means I’m a union member now.

Which begs the question: why was none of this documented here?

The answer lies in me being the kind of nerd who enjoys highly specific and customizable setups. This website is built with Gatsby.js, an open-source static site generator that turned into a business, got acquired, and then the acquirer left it to rot on the vine. But in that time, they released three major versions, each with separate breaking changes, and while dependency tracking and lockfiles should have prevented issues, they… didn’t. It took months of trying and retrying to update packages and incrementally work back toward a buildable site to just get it to work at all. It was very frustrating, and I don’t recommend anyone build with Gatsby going forward, but I’ve already invested the time in it, so I’ll keep using it for now.

The other problem has to do with the act of deploying. As a developer, I built this entire process around committing a blog post to a Git repository, pushing it to GitLab, letting GitLab’s CI rebuild the website, and then having GitLab CI connect to another server via SSH and sync the files to it. Back in 2021, I switched away from GitLab to Gitea on a server running inside my home. Gitea doesn’t have a CI, but it is very common to use Drone instead. So that half of the process needed to be rebuilt, which couldn’t really happen until the Gatsby problem was solved.

The good news is that I can build the website again, and I’ve already made a few minor changes, such as ~~burning Twitter off of here~~ updating my social links to point to Mastodon and Bluesky, and adding an automatic dark mode across the site. I have never been a great “blogger,” so I am also planning to adjust the site’s structure and design to be more focused around collections of pages rather than blog posts. For example, I love video games, and I want to organize and write about some of the games I really enjoy; a page about my Warrior of Light in Final Fantasy XIV would be a great archive for my own enjoyment. My website is for me as much as for you.

Given the decaying state of social media, the general fracturing of society along ideological lines, and the ongoing reality of the dead internet theory, it feels as good a time as any to try and kick the tires on maintaining my own personal internet garden again. I still believe in the tenets of the IndieWeb, and want to support those technologies where I can, along with bridging to the fediverse and maybe run a PDS with the blog content. I want to try to maintain a positive outlook here, but also with a critical eye on systemic and corporate levers of power. I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep it up, but hey. Nothing ever happens without intentionally starting it.

Until then, please consider tossing me back on your RSS reader such as Feeder or NetNewsWire. Thank you very much!

WWDC Should Stay Online-Only

June 29, 2020

Apple took WWDC online-only this year as a result of COVID-19. After 30-some years of the conference taking place between Santa Clara, San Jose, and San Francisco, there wasn’t precedent for this. While parts of WWDC (namely the sessions) had been easy to access online for several years, others like labs and live events were limited to on-site attendees only.

Last week we found out that, really, not much was missing. The keynote/state of the union still happened at the same times, but were pre-recorded around Apple’s campus. Sessions were released daily during the conference as videos of people talking over slide decks, rather than as presenters on stage in a conference hall. Labs were still held, but were done via teleconference and appointment. Even the Apple Design Awards and the lunch-time special guest events still happened. What was really missing was just the in-person face time from thousands of developers in one place, and the occasional event like the WWDC Bash.

But what was remarkable to me was how much better the week was as a whole. I attended WWDC in person from 2006 to 2015, and remotely since then, and this year’s conference was dramatically improved over both the onsite and online experience. So much so, that I don’t think WWDC should return as an in-person conference. Here’s why.