In brief
This website is a notebook for anything I feel like writing down. Most often, I feel like writing down thoughts about building things, or documentation for stuff I’m currently building. Entries grouped by subject matter can be found in the Index section of the website for quick reference.
Long winded thoughts, May 2026
Since I’ve finally got this project across the finish line (arbitrarily defined as a live deployed website with a custom url) and have begun transitioning from developing the thing to actually writing content, I’ve been thinking a lot about why and how I kept finding motivation to get to this point. This website has been, by far, the longest running project I’ve ever worked on. The first iteration was a portfolio I built starting in summer 2018. I wrote down scrupulous accounts of large scope projects I had worked on with hundreds of in-progress images in linear narrative style. The purpose of this website was to show how I took a hardware build project from nothing to something, in the hopes that schools and employers would see in my thought processes and experience strong fits for their admissions and recruiting classes. The about section of that site says “for the sake of documentation”. An obvious surface level motivation to continue working on this website: now that I have finished school (for now) and have a job, the old portfolio is written for an audience that no longer exists. So who is this for now? Mostly myself I think.
The experience of writing for this website, as it was for the old portfolio, is satisfying. I look forward to spending time in coffee shops to enjoy the atmosphere and sense of productivity that comes with typing away in a text editor. Thinking about it now, it’s the same feeling I’d get playing with our household calculator as a young child. I’d sit at our clear acrylic end table with a clean sheet of printer paper and a pencil, and write out sums of the natural numbers in neat columns. The pride and contentment that came from completely filling the page with my own record of the inputs and outputs of the calculator is the same I get from writing entries for this website. It feels good to write things down even if only for the sake of writing things down. Aside from that, here’s a list of other reasons I think I held on to the motivation to finish this project in no particular order:
The old portfolio was based on a bootstrap template that I didn’t write, I wanted to more completely own and define the look and feel of the website.
This is explicit self-expression.
The old portfolio format pretty much required finishing a project (very difficult) before writing, and content was made up of only finished projects. I wanted a more flexible platform which encourages writing more often, and is better set up to handle a wider variety of content subjects.
Standard human writing motivations, from wikipedia:
Individual motivations for writing include the ability to operate beyond the limitations of one’s own memory (e.g. to-do lists, recipes, reminders, logbooks, maps, directions for complicated tasks or rituals), dissemination of ideas and coordination (e.g. essays, monographs, broadsides, plans, petitions, manifestos), creativity and storytelling, maintaining kinship and other social networks business correspondence regarding goods and services, and life writing (e.g. a diary or journal).
Particularly, I connect with overcoming memory limitations, creativity, and life writing.
Writing makes thoughts and things more “official” (maybe even more real) because I took the time to consolidate and organize my thinking about them. Maybe there is a fight against entropy argument in there.
Inspiration from reading other people’s websites, like my neighbor-in-spirit Tim Monger’s beautifully assembled weekly blog. I’ve also long admired Ben Katz’s and Tim Jacobs’ (aka mitxela) legendary contributions to the maker-specific blog tradition. I wonder what they would all have to say about their motivations to write.
Why a website though? Why isn’t it as appealing to write stuff down on paper? For one, and I cannot overstate this, I love hypertext. Hypertext facilitates curiosity like nothing else. Hypertext functionality currently only exists in the web medium. Secondly, websites are super accessible. I don’t have to lug around a printed notebook to reference my writing, I just need my phone. I can easily share my work if I so desire as well, without having to publish and update print copies.
A little more on how I built this project
This website was built with Hugo, for which I found this playlist very useful to learn. Generative AI helped tremendously with the CSS styling.
