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, edited in June
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 for it, 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. That website contained scrupulous accounts of large scope builds with hundreds of work-in-progress images to prove to universities and employers that I was worthy of consideration. Now that I have finished school (for now) and have a job, the old portfolio is written for an audience that no longer exists. This website is for me now.
I look forward to spending time in coffee shops to write, as I’m doing currently at Coast Roast in Gulfport, MS. It’s satisfying to organize thoughts, and it feels good to fill the text editor window with words. I’d get a similar feeling playing with our household calculator as a child. Sitting at our clear acrylic end table with a clean sheet of printer paper and a pencil, I would calculate, then record sums of the natural numbers in neat columns because it felt good to cover the paper with marks. Work on this website project was motivated by a desire to establish better access to that.
Here’s a list of other motivations 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 more real) because I took the time to consolidate and organize my thinking about them. Maybe there is a fight against entropy motivation in there.
Small contribution to the intelligence record of the species, and future AI training material
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, I love hypertext because of how it facilitates curiosity and connection. Other hypertext thoughts well put by Vannevar Bush. 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. A big reason I was able to finish this project was the advancement of this technology to the point that I didn’t have to keep slamming my head against the wall of stylesheet hierarchies and syntax.
