Hello, world!

These days you can find plenty of information strewn across the internet—often too much, I’d argue.

In my experience, even with help from ChatGPT et al, it takes real effort to find quality information that’s relevant to your particular situation and mold it into something actually useful—an answer to your question, knowledge you need to solve a problem you have, or a skill you need to develop and use.

I’m a geek, and enjoy the process of researching, taking notes, tinkering, and building systems, and I’ve done a fair bit of it for my own purposes. I’m told not everyone finds that process to be quite as fun as I do.

My aim with this blog is to curate a collection of things I’ve spent time distilling into something useful for myself. Most content here won’t be particularly novel (little is, these days), but my hope is that a curated collection of things I’ve already synthesized might occasionally be useful to someone else (you!).

For example, this website itself is a result of me wanting to learn and tinker—I’ve wanted to get hands on with web development for years. Snippets of spare time and bursts of hyperfocus have come and gone; walking through beginner learning paths on Codecademy, fussing with the basics of HTML, CSS and JavaScript on my laptop, and occasionally getting the barest bones of a site accessible on the public internet. Lately though, Cursor-assisted development has been a huge boon for my specific skill set and ways of working. Conversationally I’m reasonably technical but I haven’t spent enough hours really immersed in the nuts and bolts of web development to confidently or quickly build a site from scratch.

Now though, I was able to go from an empty project to a live site (with monitoring, alerting, basic CI/CD pipeline, and simple analytics) in about two days’ worth of spare time. That’s super thrilling to me!

I have all sorts of half-formed ideas for what this might become, but for now I’m just excited to get something live so the distance to whatever’s next is a little shorter.

More to come.