A blog for me

"Writing is thinking" - so smarter people than me have said. But I agree, so in the spirit of wanting to do some good thinking, I'm going to get writing.

In 2004 I went on a youthful trip to Mexico. Unaware of the newly-born Wordpress, and wanting to keep my friends and family aware of my travels as a recent Computer Science graduate would think best, I wrote a little PHP script to share my daily exploits. It was a blog, though I didn't know it; each entry was recorded in a text file - flat-file we would now call it, like it is a breakthrough technology - and it displayed the entries in chronological order. I could even upload pictures from my 3 megapixel Kodak DX3700. I was blogging.

And here I am again. Using a flat-file CMS written in PHP. Everything old is new again. Just 5 versions progressed.

A return

I have been in the desert for the last few years. That is a metaphor, but also not.

About eight years ago my wife and I moved to Africa. We lived on the edge of the Kalahari, an actual desert. I continued working as a software developer, just with the occasional elephant sighting, which is quite an excellent addition to life. Then a few years ago we both embarked on some volunteer work which took us away from all we knew, and into the world of construction; bricks, concrete, all of that.

Of course, when I had downtime, I coded. I enjoyed the different kind of brain work. When the COVID pandemic hit and we had to stay inside for several months I brushed off my Laravel experience, combined it with a bit of Python, and built Muddler.

Then there was Houseplay, an app that was originally written in Ruby on Rails. I just didn't have the time to stay fluent in multiple frameworks and languages, so I consolidated things, and moved that to Laravel also.

And in the last few months I have been tinkering with a different take on time-keeping. It's always something I struggle with. I use the GTD method to, you know, get things done, but I never seem to have any idea of what it was exactly I got done. That app is written in Typescript. Hopefully I'll have something to show in due course.

But in the more immediate future, we are moving back to Australia, and kicking off life there again. So here I am, getting my brain in gear, and this little blog is going to help.

That's the plan anyway.