Three years, a new coat of paint, and a whole new collection of technical hyper-fixations.
It's been a little over three years since I last posted anything here. Apparently, my approach to maintaining a blog has been roughly the same as my approach to cleaning out the garage: I'll get around to it eventually.
It would seem that eventually has arrived! Well, for the blog. I'll get to the garage, I swear.
For the three people that have been here before, you've probably noticed that the site looks a little different. I've finally gotten around to giving it a much needed redesign. The old design served its purpose, but it looked dated when it was new, and I wanted something cleaner, simpler and a little less cringey.
Man, that's an ugly website. Who built that garbage?
So, what have I been up to?
For awhile, web design and development were really interesting. I enjoyed building this website, experimenting with the JavaScript that pulled it together and figuring out how to make things work. I still enjoy that stuff, but somewhere along the way, my attention wandered.
Recently, I've spend more time working with self-hosted services, automation, Python, and, more recently, artificial intelligence. What started as an interest in building websites has evolved into an interest in writing Python scripts to do my day job for me, building workflows and figuring out how to duct tape different applications and services together to make one useful tool.
My current collection of projects includes a home server, various self-hosted applications and an increasingly elaborate AI assistant setup. Much of it is genuinely useful. Some of it probably exists because I wanted to see whether I could make it work.
What's next? I'd like to start writing here more often. Not necessarily about web development, although I'm sure that'll come up again, but about whatever technical rabbit hole I happen to be exploring. That might mean documenting a project, explaining how I solved a particularly irritating problem, reviewing something I've been experimenting with or sharing an idea that seemed brilliant until I actually tried implementing it.
I'm not planning on turning this into a tutorial site or pretend to be some kind of expert on everything (or anything) I write about. Mostly, I want a place to document what I'm learning, share the occasional useful discovery and maybe save somebody else a few hours of troubleshooting or, at the very least, provide an oppertunity for someone else to laugh at me for managing to make a relatively simple task unnecessarily complicated.
The site has a new look, my interests have expanded and I've accumulated plenty of things worth writing about. Whether that translates into a steady stream of posts or another three year stretch of radio silence remains to be seen. But, hey, I finally got around to making the site prettier and posting this. I'd call that progress!