Back to the Blog
This site has been around, in one form or another, for over a decade. It started as a pile of Markdown files that a small Ruby script turned into HTML pages. Later it became a little Sinatra app that renders the same Markdown on the fly. The blog lived there, quietly, for years.
At some point it went dark. Not deleted - the posts were all still sitting in a folder - but nothing linked to them anymore. Earlier this year I simplified the homepage down to a photo, an email address, and a LinkedIn link. It was honest, in a way. I wasn’t writing here. Why pretend?
This week I brought it back.
How it came back
I rebuilt it in an afternoon, working with an AI coding assistant. It found the old posts, worked out why a few pages had been quietly broken for years (methods defined inside templates, a missing file, a character encoding that only worked by accident on the server), fixed them, and helped me design a new look. Old links from years ago redirect to the right places. There’s an RSS feed again. The whole thing is still a small Sinatra app reading Markdown files from a folder, which is how I like it.
A few years ago that would have been a weekend, maybe more. This time I spent most of my effort on the part I actually cared about: deciding what this place should be.
About the posts from the quiet years
You’ll notice the blog now has posts for the years I wasn’t writing here. I should be honest about those. They were drafted with AI help, working from my older writing, from things I’d posted elsewhere, and from what I was thinking and doing at the time. I’ve edited them to say what I actually believe. But they weren’t written in those years, and I don’t want anyone to think otherwise.
I went back and forth about whether to do it at all. In the end, it felt like a fitting experiment for this moment: the same tools I’ve been writing about, used on my own words, with my own judgment as the final filter. It’s also, I suppose, a small demonstration of everything I believe about working with these machines. They can produce a great deal, quickly. Whether it’s true - whether it’s really mine - is still my responsibility.
Why come back at all
Two reasons.
The first is that I miss writing. Writing is how I think. When I don’t write, I notice that my ideas get vaguer, and I become more certain about things I haven’t examined.
The second is something I wrote about last year: the knowledge we share in public is the commons everyone learns from, people and machines alike. If experienced people stop writing things down, that commons gets thinner. I’ve benefited from other people’s blogs for twenty-six years. I’d like to keep adding to the pool.
What to expect
Not much, and not on a schedule. Notes on building software, on working with AI, on the strange and interesting job market, on senior developers and the people who will become them. Occasionally something about the rest of life.
If you’ve been reading since the early posts about Git and MongoDB and vanilla JavaScript: thank you, and welcome back. If you’re new: hello. The archive is open.
The folder was always there. I just had to start writing again.