🌏 About This Site
My site here is many things--some surface area for myself on the internet, a way to reach out to others. But, above all else, it's written in Markdown.
I decided at a certain point that I wanted to make it as frictionless as I could to write something and get it up on the web, while still being able to use the command line and git to produce the project. That way I don't have to log in to anything--it's local to live all the time.
There are a couple of different things which enable this:
- Hosting the site on someone else's computer (Microsoft/GitHub)
- Automated actions when a commit is made to the repo
- A custom markdown parser that I wrote
My small corner of the internet has had several different forms, and this is probably not the final one it will take.
Back in the heady days of AOL, I had an Angelfire web page, where I ran a paper-and-pencil RPG for my friends at school. Beginning in 2013 or 2014, I first published something to GitHub to document my learning journey of data science. Now I have this simple page--it's only sporadically updated, but the design is straightforward, works across platforms, and is imminently thinkable because it's written in simple HTML/CSS and JavaScript.
What's with the weird little button in the corner?
My button is how you get some quick summaries to my occasionally excessive writing. It doesn't work on every page, because some pages are short by default--you can't summarize everything.
Why write a custom parser for your blog?
I think it's important to have a silly little place where you can do a silly little thing. Many people I respect describe software as something which can be homespun, built out by hobbyists, intentionally not scaled for the masses, and I believe this at my core too.
What follows are a collection of different ideas on this theme, some by me and some by others:
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Robin Sloan is the originator of the "software-as-home-cooked-meal" as far as I know.
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Sometimes being the best doesn't matter; it's more about the act of producing something. When I work on this blog, I'm a mediocre woodworker building a mediocre chair--the skills I gain from trying to create order from chaos (or wood, as the case may be) are more important than the final project itself. As they say at Daptone Records, shitty is pretty.
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One of my central theses is that as the internet becomes more of a dark forest and consolidation of platforms occurs, it is important to understand and control something which resembles the means of production.
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There are so many layers of abstraction that knowing how everything works perfectly is a quixotic undertaking. Reality has a surprising amount of information in it, and comprehending it at all levels is impossible; but being able to think through exactly what you need and deliver on it makes you a better thinker.