It’s been 20+ years since I started this domain. It has been a portfolio, a research blog, listings of projects, other attempts at blogs… and then it was stagnant for a long time.
Compared to what I used to consider worth posting two decades ago, I now have tons of work and life experience to draw from. But over all that time, I’ve followed no consistent practice for recording or distilling. My memories are smeared across an array of journals, apps, files, emails, chats, and sticky notes.
There is also the problem of the shrinking dad brain.
More than any of that though, a challenge unique to this era is suppressing the recurring bad idea to autocomplete my unbaked thoughts. In software work, I use LLMs a lot. They handle some tasks that require real depth. But when I try to apply them to writing, I don’t fully incubate the ideas, and the results just have that LLM smell.
All to say: returning to writing after a long time has not been just like riding a bike. It’s been slow, unsteady, and awkward. I keep wanting to drive or take a bus or just stay home and eat Mini Mint It’s Its, 1 but I’m persevering.
I’ve restarted this site by migrating a number of posts from Bearblog, which I was using to warm up my voice again. I don’t think I’ve actually warmed it up, but I’m less afraid now. Bear has been great for just getting the words out into the great ether. Real humans even saw my words and occasionally upvoted them. I may continue posting the fragmented stuff there.
And here I’ll post the (hopefully) more polished thoughts that might actually be useful.
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the classic bay area dessert, now in a daintier format. ↩︎