2025-02-20 11:21:41
I just read through Kevin Kelly’s 50 Years of Travel Tips and it’s a solid list.
I don’t know that I have any tips. People travel differently. My ex loves cruises. I see the appeal but it’s not my preferred type of travel. Neither is sitting on a beach (“earning 20%”) for a week. Although, in this -20º weather, sipping margaritas at a swim-up bar is very enticing.
My preferences (which you can call tips, if you’d like):
E&E (engagement and experience) over R&R (rest and relaxation).
Organize around passions, not destinations. That has been restaurants, bars, coffee, cigars, and photography. Doing so has pushed me to locations I might not have gone otherwise, like the Faroe Islands or a train station on the outskirts of Munich.
Be a tourist. Do all the tourist traps. I’ll take the bus tours. I’ll do the guided tours. Give me the lay of the land. Give me some history. Give me some context.
Take photos. It’s a way to document the trip but it’s also a way for me to be creative. They’re also a way for me to enjoy being a tourist and enjoy my passions.
Airbnb ain’t want it used to be (and as I write this, news of an Airbnb exec joining the American Govt’s DOGE isn’t great). But I like the concept and I’ve had great success with using them in the past. There’s VRBO and other platforms. My rule of thumb has generally been a hotel for short stays and Airbnb for longer ones or where the sleeping arrangements are more complicated. I’ve even done just a room in somebody’s place, if I really need a bed to crash on for a night or two.
Pack light. I’ve done three-week trips with a carry-on. I have no problem hitting up a laundromat. Throw the clothes in, go grab a bite to eat, then come back, throw everything in the dryer, grab another bite to eat. Or hang out and read for awhile. Or find a hotel or Airbnb with a washer and/or dryer.
Skip the souvenirs. I don’t want a house full of knick knacks. Almost all of the souvenirs I’ve brought back for my kids have been lost or broken. The photos and memories are my souvenirs. (That’s not to say I’ve completely avoided souvenirs but they’re few and far between and I lean on artwork to fill my spaces.)
Don’t be afraid to repeat locations. Clearly a privilege of having travelled as much as I have, there’s a charm to visiting the same place more than once. I’ve already learned the lay of the land and can take a more relaxed approach the second (or third or fourth) time around.
Travel should be fun and I recognize that it can be stressful. Flights get delayed. Reservations get cancelled. Travelling with kids is parenting in another location, often with less supports.
2025-02-10 01:01:15
I recently subscribed to Robb Knight’s blog and came across a post on utility knives. In a small bit of serendipity, I recently rediscovered my favourite utility knife.
Having a little knife for opening up boxes and whatnot always felt like an unnecessary purchase. I usually just flip open a pair of scissors and use a side to slice through the box. It’s mildly unwieldy but sufficient.
I’ve been slowly cleaning the house, getting rid of things that aren’t needed anymore. With one kid having moved out and the other on the cusp, their toys and clothes from when they were ten no longer needed to be taking up space in the house. A collection of boxes had also accumulated under the basement stairs, many of which were placed under there when I moved into the house 11 years ago and then never touched again. You know, like that box of serial cables and phone cords. Or a box of random paper and pens that were once an office drawer quickly dumped to be moved but never sorted.
In amongst all of these artifacts was an old knife. A 30 year old knife.
This is my old knife from when I used to work at Toys R Us all those years ago. To me, this is the perfect utility knife. I enjoy its simplicity. A quick tap on either end extracts or retracts the blade. New blades are easily replaced. It’s small and unassuming. And the Fisher-Price stickers give it just the right amount of je ne sais quoi.
2025-01-29 07:30:41
I came across these Guiding Principles for my website and it has me thinking what my principles or tenets or guiding lights might be for my own site.
The initial tagline for my site was “tips, tricks, and bookmarks on web development”. I like to think that described the site rather well. Casual but professional, where even the personal posts were more often than not about professional matters like going freelance or getting a new job.
With an explicit shift into considering this a personal blog, I changed the tagline to the “life & times of a web developer”, which perhaps implies web development more than it does life, but c’est la vie.
So, what guides what I write here? Using Tracy’s principles as a jumping-off point…
I believe I’ve done just that over the years and intend to keep it that way. I invite conversation but I’ve chosen not to have those conversations on my site. Maintaining comments had turned into a hassle with 99% of them being spam. Each article in my RSS feed has a link to send me an email. (Perhaps I should add the same to each page on the site.)
Share where it may be of value to others. I share my perspective in hopes of enriching others. I learn from others—perhaps others can learn from me. That doesn’t mean every detail gets shared—especially of my personal life. I desire to protect the people I care about. While I may talk of my friends and family, it’s generally done in vague terms.
One thing that I will start doing is being more explicit about asking permission before sharing. Photos taken in public spaces where the people are unidentified feels like a grey area, though. While most of my public photography doesn’t include people, sometimes it happens. I don’t want to inadvertently be adding them to some facial recognition database somewhere. I’ll be consciously thinking about this going forward.
This site has always been a playground for myself—from way back in the day playing with fixed positioning to researching the ins and outs of various CSS properties to learning about different technology.
While I haven’t redesigned this site in a long time, I’ve been using subdomains for playing with ideas and stretching my creative muscles. It’s always been fun to explore different topics and see what I can pull off technically.
There’s no analytics. I’m not trying to drive a bunch of traffic to the site and posting it on Hacker News or Reddit or whatever. There no posting schedule, optimizing for when people are most likely to read and share. Posting is random and it can be consumed at will.
I write about what I want to write about and how I want to write about it. I might be wrong about something. I have biases. I am human. I am imperfect. My writing might be informal but I rarely cuss and I don’t see that changing. I don’t use emojis. Historically, it was because encoding was a hassle. Now, it’s because emojis render differently and may give a different meaning than intended depending on the platform or even depending on what generation you’re from. (Thumbs up emoji gang here.)
In a general sense, I’ve tried to do that and in that general sense, I believe I have succeeded.
From a political standpoint, I’ve been quiet and perhaps even a coward. It’s been easy to hide behind the idea that this is a tech blog and not a political one but as we’ve seen, tech is political. It’s difficult to use or talk about different platforms without acknowledging the ethical and non-ethical uses of those platforms.
I am progressive and believe in caring for people. I don’t have any party affiliations. I don’t believe political parties should be treated like a sports team. I believe in human rights and that includes everybody, regardless of gender or sex.
One of the reasons I’ve moved to publishing more of my content on my own sites is because I don’t want to associate with platforms that are money and power hungry, abusing algorithms and advertising. I also don’t want to abandon friends and lose connections because those platforms are the places where they live.
These six guidelines are just that. They’re not hard rules. They’re just ways that I am thinking about how I express myself, both here and on social media.
2025-01-28 01:42:51
I have a desire to write better.
I’m self aware to the extent that I know—or believe I know—that my writing is simplistic. My sentences are short and direct. There isn’t much flourish.
This can be handy when describing a technical topic in a blog post but not very handy when describing a technical topic in what should be a 500 page book. It’s also not very handy when wanting to evoke deep emotions and painting a descriptive scene that immerses someone into the story.
I imagine people as born storytellers but, in reality, I know that it comes from exposure to good work—just like anything else. It comes from study. It comes from practice. I need to learn more. I need to read more. I need to write more.
Maybe a run-on sentence every now and then wouldn’t hurt. Every sentence doesn’t need to be under twelve words long. Every blog post doesn’t need to be broken down into bullet points to make it easier for a reader to scan, dotted with headlines to make it easier for a reader to skim. Maybe I could stop using first person so much. It feels almost narcissistic in how much I use the word I. On a technical topic, I didn’t want to impose. “You should do this. You need to do that.” No, I did this. Take from my retelling on a technical topic what you want. Your mileage may vary. There are no warranties or refunds or exchanges. Carry on with my experiences at your own risk.
But on any other topic? How do I describe what feels indescribable, ineffable. Others paint a picture and I’m throwing paint on a canvas, frustrated that the splatters haven’t magically dripped and oozed into some masterpiece of pointillism as if that’s how it’s supposed to work.
This was another post from the drafts—this time from January of 2020. Can’t say I’ve done much in those four years since writing this to work on my writing. Every now and then I manage a morsel of wordplay that tickles my brain but creating a larger narrative that turns multiple morsels into an entire meal has still escaped me.
[“Escaped me.” These four years haven’t been like The Fugitive where creative writing leaps off a sewer pipe to evade captivity. No, it’s more like it’s been knocking on my door while I lay in bed with the sheets over my head yelling that nobody is home.]
But perhaps with a renewed interest in stretching my creative muscles, better writing will see the light of day.
2025-01-28 00:28:47
They say success is all about who you know but I’d argue—especially in our loosely connected world—it’s all about who knows you.
One path to success—and I believe there are many—is to put content out there to gain an audience. Some of them are easy to do, some are harder.
Here’s a quick list of ideas:
Early on in my career, I made a concerted effort to get my name (and content) onto sites beyond my own blog. I asked to write for Digital Web and A List Apart and 24Ways. I asked a publisher to write a book. I asked to speak at conferences.
Each of those things led to more and more exposure to the point where I had an audience to leverage into other things. It is this formula that I’ve seen others in our industry use very well. They’ve been able to leverage their work into getting better jobs or other opportunities.
You don’t need to be an expert.
You just need to share your experience.
You might be reluctant to share your experience because you feel you aren’t an expert. In reality, sharing your experience of starting out with something can be useful to those also just starting out and it can be useful to those who have previous experience and are trying to make things easier for those jumping in.
As a result of putting yourself out there in this way, people learn who you are. It’s like advertising or marketing. The more you put yourself out there, the more people see it, the more people are likely to remember you.
Don’t expect success to come overnight. You may have spent hours on that well-crafted blog post but that doesn’t instantly translate into thousands of visitors. You may consider your content to be better than someone else’s content that is getting more attention. It very well might be better. But I believe there is a misconception that more work equals more success and that more success means you must be a better/smarter person—neither of which is true.
I started blogging heavily in 2003 but it wasn’t until I experimented with fixed positioning in 2005 that I started to gain some traction. I co-authored books in 2007. I wrote for A List Apart in 2009. SMACSS in 2011. There was a lot of content and projects launched in between all of that.
Not everybody buys into this path. Not everybody can. Not everybody has the time nor the inclination to crank out content in their spare time like this. Like I said at the beginning, there are multiple paths and this is but one.
As a white male in Western society, I recognize that I come from a place of privilege. I have received very little criticism and push back. Whereas, I’ve seen women and people of colour receive much worse, making it harder for them to put themselves out there.
This blog post has been sitting in my drafts since 2018. I’d like to say it was well before the enshitification of social media services but one could argue they’ve not been good for a long time before that. Do you prop up services that you don’t align with morally to build and maintain an audience to boost your own career? There’s only so many bills that get paid with righteousness. I am not here to judge you.
I closed my Twitter account but would I have been more likely to stay on if I was still trying to sell my book? Maybe.
I enjoyed reading Doing Good Better and perhaps is relevant to how we think of what it means to operate in these ambiguous situations. I also think of The Good Place and how they tried to measure what’s good and what’s bad and wow, nobody was good enough for the good place.
As many services prove themselves to be terrible stewards of decency, the pendulum appears to be swinging to a more grassroots, build-and-manage-your-own platform. (That could just be that many of the people I follow are from an era that started out doing just that. Is that reflective of a larger movement? Time will tell.)
As a return to blogging builds momentum, link often, provide credit, and encourage others to do the same. We can also use more collaboration and fun in our worlds.
Three people that I’ve enjoyed following are Jason Lengstorf, Lynn Fisher, and Ana Tudor.
Whatever path you decide, considering the job and political market at this time, may we all find hope and success.
2025-01-23 23:41:02
I stumbled across an old screenshot of text, heavily aged by its multi-generational jpeg artifacts—like looking at the stippled grain of film, telling the story from a dog’s perspective, living an entire lifetime and only catching a small span of its owner’s life.
From there, I thought of the life of those that far exceed those of human life—like a tree. What must a human’s existence seem like to a tree, slowly aging in place, as life streams around it.
My stream of thoughts continue again to my small collection of plants and how I’ve unexpectedly managed to keep them alive—my orchid continuing to bloom heavily.
Taking care of plants is like taking care of humans: small gestures performed occasionally, with the fruits of those actions only seen months or years later, wondering along the way if those actions had any effect at all.
As a parent, I provide guidance in hopes that my boys are full of the positive adjectives we want for our children. And again, it’ll be years—even decades—before I see the effect I’ve had. How many years of therapy will my kids need, as I myself have needed to understand the effect my parents had on me?
As a manager, I wouldn’t know until weeks or months later whether my direction or guidance was effective for my team. Did I provide them the right information? Did I protect them from the inane bureaucracy?
Perhaps that is one of the things I’ve enjoyed most about web development: its immediacy. I type something in one place and view its effects in another place. The reward is quick and encouraging.
Ah, the comfort of opening up that editor, typing some commands, refreshing the browser, and basking in the immediate glow of success. Or failure. Let’s be honest: lots of failure. But that failure is immediate, allowing us to course correct right away. How do I course correct as a parent or as a manager when the failure isn’t immediate or clear?
Then, your kid is being a kind parent to his kids or your team ships that new feature on time to much acclaim. We are filled with pride in their victories and in our small part in it. Watering, at the right time, when it’s needed, allows things to blossom.
Over my lifetime, I’ve found myself in a repeated cycle of starting as an individual contributor and then moving into management. (I suppose starting a family could be framed the same way!) I always felt uncomfortable as a manager. For many of those times I was pushed into management, I don’t think I was particularly good, either. I didn’t know what to do. Watering, at the wrong time, makes things harder to grow.
Thankfully, there are lots of great resources out there to make us better gardeners, better parents, and better managers—resources that either weren’t available or easily accessible twenty-plus years ago.
I, on the other hand, am happy to be an individual contributor. Just give me a to-do list and I’ll live in my little world of instant feedback while the trees (and perhaps even rocks) look on in wonder.
