Recent Posts

In my last post, I alluded to the anxiety I’m feeling about watching the type of work I’ve been doing for the last twenty years seem to evaporate. AI tools have made coding faster, cheaper, and more accessible than ever. If a machine can do what I do, do I still matter?

Unless you’ve been asleep since October, you know that there has been a step change in how software is being created. People who have never opened a terminal before are now showing off fully formed applications. My son created an activity scheduling app for a class project and won himself a Starbucks gift card.

At the end of the year, I’m going to be entering the job market for the first time in twenty years. It’s not entirely by choice. Sometimes the universe just conspires against you.

My current employer is making this transition as painless as they can, so I’m fortunate and grateful. But the world I find myself stepping out into as a software professional in the age of vibe code is, as you may have read lately, terrifying.

Before the algorithms, there was the blogroll. It was a simple list of links directing visitors–gasp–away from your site, to other sites you enjoy.

Blogrolls showed up almost as soon as blogging did, sometime around 1999 or 2000. They were partly a practical way to keep track of your favorite sites before RSS readers, and partly social. Linking to someone’s blog was an acknowledgment, and a suggestion of other people to read on what was then a pretty small internet.

It’s been about 20 years since I had a blog, and a lot has changed. Before there were Facebook, Twitter, Substack, or any of the other walled-off platforms, there was Movable Type. It wasn’t the first blogging platform, but it was a pivotal tool in the history of personal publishing.

To honor that legacy, I created a new theme for the Hugo static site generator that pays homage to the simple layout of the themes that shipped with Movable Type in early 2005, albeit with some modern touches such as mobile support and dark mode.

We have so much time, and so little to do.