Public version 5

It’s version 5 of this kind of career-forward website for me, certainly not the fifth canonical version of my website. This is a project that I abandon and come back to more often than I’ll ever admit. Despite the façade of confidence and swagger, I think personal sites are monumental challenges for even the best designers, developers, writers, whoever decides to do this. It is deeply anxiety-inducing.

I’m releasing this before it’s finished, so expect some bugs and rough areas, including:

• Some buttons do not look like buttons yet
• Hover interaction on lists of articles need refinement
• My little rotate-screen widget interaction is broken!
• “About” is not fully concocted, but I decided to ship it at Good Enough™ for now.
• Unbelievable to be typing this, but I did not fully QA test on mobile yet
• OpenGraph (OG) images are not re-styled
• Long bullet points in lists do not wrap to new lines in proper alignment (you’ll see what I mean on this post)
• blockquote blocks carry the left-hand border down to the quote attribution. This bugs me to no end.
• I really need to clean up the primary stylesheet
• “Read next” blogroll footers include current page

I want to call out the typeface in particular. Two Ukrainian software studios, MacPaw and AlphaBravo, collaborated on it and gifted it to the world with an open license. They ask for nothing in return, but if we wish to thank them, they provide an option to donate to the MacPaw Foundation, which is providing relief to Ukrainians during the Russian invasion.

In utter hardship, they crafted something beautiful, named it after their studio cat, Fixel, and buried the donation call-to-action at the very bottom of a very long, very beautiful page.

This gesture and the absolute beauty of the typeface was what prompted me to rip off my own bandaid and try again here, with this.

Ideally this is a hub for my goings-on, a way to own my content and corner of the Internet. It wouldn’t put so much emphasis on my software career, so much as offer broadly all the things I want to share. It’s still not an ideal site, but this is a much better flavor.

Some things I’m looking forward to trying in v5:

• There’s a growing movement in going back to full-color filled-in iconography. While my line icons are not bad (hat’s off to the chef), I sure did miss seeing full objects (I’m the chef).
• OS emoji are cool and all, but what if I got back into illustration?
• The footer could really use…something. I’m not sure yet.
• De-emphasizing professional software work without burying it
• Updated: It is done. Creating a website changelog page, alongside the Colophon. These housekeeping pages always please me when I see them. They’re like anthropological artifacts. Like a captain’s log or the due date stamp sheet in the backs of old library books.
• Bringing back books, music, playlist pages

The previous version was ugly to me for so many reasons. I’m glad to be rid of it. As always, even with the quick turnaround, I still had feedback and support from peers and friends. My thanks and gratitude to them. I hope you enjoy it. I hope it sparks in someone the urge and audacity to go learn some code and attempt almost relentlessly to build their own static site.