When I started working in IT in 2010 or so, I created this awesome list of blogs that were written by individuals who had something smart, funny, or weird to say. I learned a lot from those blogs, I read them religiously thanks to Google Feeds, RIP. Now, I get lucky to run across something cool by scrolling Hacker News or tripping over it through a DuckDuckGo search. I don’t have a RSS feeds list anymore and I’m not sure why.

Social media has sucked up everything cool about the internet and made it absolutely terrible. Everything is just sound bytes and click bait that requires exactly zero effort to post. And it shows. It shows in a lot of the people I follow, it shows in what I post, and worst of all - the uniqueness, the weirdness, the personality has been largely removed. Personality has been replaced with snark, uniqueness replaced with the same 12 blog themes, and weirdness replaced with touched up and airbrushed versions of our lives. We need GeoCities and MySpace to come back. Places where even non-technical folks could build a website that was all about them. A place where you could let your weirdness show and stop worrying about likes, views, and retweets.

A few months ago I started embarking on making this site gorgeous, by modern standards, largely because a lot of people in the industry are rocking some absolutely beautiful sites. What I realized though, was that I hated it. I hated worrying about pixel level perfection. Color schemes. I hated worrying about how many people would stay on my site. I hated that I was editing down the content because it was no longer relevant or didn’t fit the theme. The truth is, there is a lot of content that I’ve written over the years that would still be helpful to someone, even if it’s no longer relevant to me, and I’ve largely lost that content.

I’m going to start digging through the achives of old, ancient backups, forgotten Github repos, Internet Archive - basically anything I can to find old posts and restore them to their former glory. Things that I wouldn’t stand-by anymore, I’ll add a little addendum to the top, but still show the post in it’s full glory.

I’m going to focus on using my website as a place to land my thoughts, experiments, and my personality. People can opt in using my feed, or not, I don’t have any analytics so it doesn’t matter and I don’t care. This site will be a reflection of my interests, not what the industry wants to see.

If you like the content or have questions, cool, reach out at hello AT this site.

Let’s bring back the weird web.