Welcome: The unceremonious launch

Hey there.

You actually showed up, impressive 🙌

If you’re reading this shortly after I posted, thanks for being a good friend and/or family member. Otherwise, I’m glad you still made it.

What is this place? Why does it exist?

I’m hoping to use this website as a canvas to paint a more detailed picture of my thoughts, muh feels, and also share potentially useful information I encounter. This is literally my domain, my repository of thoughts, projects, and honestly whatever I care to place here.

Have you ever just - wrote something? And no, I don’t mean the one-to-two sentences you send your bff that makes you think you talk too much. I mean, actually just wrote something?

When I post on social media, send a message to a friend, or just share thoughts - there’s always that itch to overshare. Why just say the bare minimum when you could give them everything they could ever want, and the kitchen sink too?

The truth is, normal day-to-day life is not really suitable for relaying dense information; the nitty-gritty details that my jam-packed autismo brain just wants to hurl at everyone at 10 meters per word. No survivors.

Eventually, this website will be expanded to include detailed breakdowns of my projects, professional opinions, and personal anecdotes. Eventually

(Nerdy bits) Can you tell me more about this site? How is it built.

Nobody in real life would probably ask this, but I’m going to tell you anyways.

Earlier in my career, I mostly made money by pushing static site generation to my clients as a one-stop shop for all their SEO needs. I pretty-much became an expert, building custom tooling for each client that was fast enough to make quick edits easy, but modular enough that if they hired someone later on down the track I wouldn’t get death threats from suicidal developers sent to my personal email.

This site (hopefully) consolidates much of what I learned from my older-career days, and applies them to modern tooling. This site in particular is powered by Next.js - but using their static site export functionality instead of pure server-generated caching.

For me, this has tons of benefits.

• Cheaper. Statically generated blog offloads compute to the viewer (if any), and means I only have to upload static content. Many hosting services make this highly affordable, and sometimes even free.
• Faster. Statically generated content means that all-over the world, users and bots alike will have instant access to my blog.
• Accessible. The lack of dynamically loaded content means that web-crawlers (search bots) and screen readers won’t have to work overtime to extrapolate content from my site.
• Ethical. Statically generated content means I don’t need to use creepy localised analytics, as the content delivery network will let me see which parts of the world my viewers “likely” are (which is good enough for me).
• Easy-to-archive. Server-rendered sites are taxing on systems like the Wayback Machine, and nearly impossible to download efficiently using a tool like wget. If you like archiving do-dads, each post and page on this site can be archived as a html file without the need waiting.

(If you already know me) Why did this site take so long to make?

This is not my first site, but that site is archaeology now - in oneness with the internet archives.

Honestly, my life over the last 3 years has been - enduring. Yeah, that’s not a typo. I’ve had 4x growth as a human being, but that was done in x/2 the time it should have had things gone more smoothly.

I have lots of projects, and some get done before others. This project got the backburner treatment for quite some time - namely due to the circumstances mentioned above. I’m grateful that I’ve finally found time for myself after so much time of turmoil.

There’s more to come!

I hope to update this with relevant information and updates as time goes on, but honestly - I’m mostly just glad to see this site launch and live somewhere else besides in my head.

See you again soon

• Flynn