Somehow its already over nine years since I last properly updated this website. Back then I had the full intention of actually using this place as a blog to write about worldbuilding endeavours and interesting software things I did or came across. Despite writing lots of worldbuilding stuff in the time since I never actually polished anything enough for me to want to publish it here, and the idea slowly passed out of mind.
There's also an article I wrote about using BuildStream to build reproducible container images with fully traceable contents, which never saw the light of day for some reason. That article is now hopelessly out of date as the BuildStream of the mid-late 2010s and the BuildStream of today are quite different beasts.
The last redesign came off the back of attending an OpenStack summit and for some reason I can't remember deciding to spend my downtime in Barcelona playing with design ideas to move away from the website I designed in about 2010.
This one comes off the back of finally reaching some threshold of thinking its ridiculous that I still link to this place from basically everywhere else I have an online presence, and this place looks like I've not done anything since 2016.
Overall this redesign is less drastic than the last. I'm still using
Pelican to generate the site from Markdown, and the overall structure is
the same. Things are now actually version controlled with git though,
currently on a self-hosted Forgejo instance which isn't publically
accessible. That will change in the future, as and when I get round to it.
At some point (ha!) I'll probably tidy up the things section to refer to projects that I'm actually actively working on, in addition to the overall facelift that this place has had. I already added BuildGrid there, the open source remote execution and caching service I've worked on since 2019.
Since 2016
There's a bit of a 2016 nostalgia trend going around on social media at the moment. As far as I know its just a coincidence that I've decided to post here again for the first time since then, though maybe that subconsciously pushed me into it a bit.
2016 was a very different time. Back then I was still working on StoryBoard actively as part of my day job, writing Python and JavaScript that no doubt I would hate to re-read now.
In 2017 I co-presented a talk at the OpenStack summit about StoryBoard, which I definitely should also have written about here.
Also in 2017 I moved onto other projects at work, and so broadly ran out of time to do anything more than maintenance work on the project. In the early COVID era I had a bit more free time, and did some work to try to modernise things, but with only me really having time, and even then not much, things never properly took off again.
2017 is also when I stepped back from my role as Technikos over at Exilian. Trying to juggle other hobbies, work, and other commitments meant I didn't really have the time to do anything useful in the role, and my posting activity in general there was also very down. It's quite strange to consider that that part of my life was almost a decade ago; the impact of the pandemic on my perception of time is quite something.
I've been involved with Exilian since it's inception in 2008, and I think it was rediscovering my enjoyment of that community which started me on the road to redesigning this site and deciding to have another go at telling myself I'll actually write some things here.
Specifically I discovered Vintage Story last year, which for some reason pressed the exact "post about this on Exilian" buttons that nothing had properly done for some time. I did that, and in the process of doing so sort of rediscovered how lovely Exilian is in general, and how well the concept of the place maps to my overall values.
As an aside, everyone should play Vintage Story.
Over the summer of last year I redesigned the website for Exilian, having been responsible for creating most of the original design way back in 2012 or so. Things were long overdue an upgrade, and the simple PHP used to render it is also now much nicer. I'll probably write a full post about this redesign at some point.
I also realised around then that I really wished I'd just posted about lots of things more, and resolved to just do that. I've posted a lot there since, of course lots of forum games but also actively talking about projects I'm working on, and even just a travelogue-type post of a trip to Wales last year. I intend to do more of all that going forwards too.
I've eventually resolved to bring that same mindset into more parts of my life, here included. I intend to populate this place with a large variety of posts, from random thoughts to detailed articles about things I work on and everything in between.
Other developments since 2016 include learning naalbinding, a kind of single-needle yarn craft for making fabric, and (slowly) learning Italian. Oh, and I also bought a house and learnt to drive.
2016 wasn't just a very different time on a personal level. The world was in a very different place; when I last posted here the UK was fresh from the back of voting for Brexit, an event which feels more idiotic with every passing day at the moment. The 2016 US election had yet to happen, with all the horrors that has unleashed.
In 2016 the tech industry still felt exciting to me, a feeling which nowadays is mostly replaced by at best suspicion. At some point between then and now things have really gone off the rails. I think that in practice things were likely already well along the path, but nostalgia always brings out the rose-tinted glasses.
In my mind, the tech industry of 2016 still felt innovative in ways that seemed positive for humanity, with work done overall in earnest by people with good intentions. By 2026 surveillance capitalism and technofascism have fully swallowed the soul of vast swathes of the industry. Perhaps it was always thus and I am simply getting older; but I feel like the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
Whenever I see the 2016 nostalgia trend, one thing looms large in my mind as a critical lens to view it through. In 2016, everything seemed awful. At the end of the year the discourse was all about how happy people were that 2016 was over. Perhaps this is a sad indictment of the way things have gone since, but I think in reality this is a real danger of nostalgia. We shouldn't be wanting 2016 back, or even 2015 back. We should be aiming to make 2026 better.
Going forward
This time I intend to actually make promising to post here more often stick. By doing the same on Exilian I think I've largely broken the barrier of perfectionism which prevented me from every really doing so in the past, and the new design here feels clean and exciting enough to actually write a post without getting bogged down fixing random design bugs.
As mentioned earlier in this post, I intend to populate this blog with bits of everything, but for it to really count as success to me I want to end up with at least a few long-form posts about both software engineering and worldbuilding.