Bootstrapping a Blog: An Interlude (Part 2 1/2)

January 14 2023

“In four thousand years we could have made a better stove.”

“Would I be able to take that stove apart and fix it?”

“You wouldn’t have to, because it would never break.”

“But I want to know if I could understand such a stove.”

“You’re the kind of person who could probably understand just about anything if you set your mind to it.”

“Nice flattery, Raz, but you keep dodging the question.”

“All right, I take your point. You’re really asking if the average person could understand the workings of such a thing…”

“I don’t know what an average person is. But look at Yul here. He built his stove himself. Didn’t you, Yul?”

Yul was uneasy that Cord had suddenly made this conversation about him. But he deferred to her. He glanced away and nodded. “Yup. Got the burners from scavengers. Welded up the frame.”

“And it worked,” Cord said.

“I know,” I said, and patted my belly.

“No, I mean the system worked!” Cord insisted.

“What system?”

She was exasperated. “The… the…”

“The non-system,” Yul said. “The lack of a system.”

“Yul knew that stoves like this were unreliable!” Cord said, nodding at the broken one

“He’d learned that from experience.”

“Oh, bitter experience, my girl!” Yul proclaimed.

“He ran into some scavengers who’d found better burner heads in a ruin up north. Haggled with them. Figured out a way to hook them up. Probably has been tinkering with them ever since.”

“Took me two years to make it run right,” Yul admitted.

“And none of that would have been possible with some kind of technology that only an avout can understand,” Cord concluded."

– Excerpt from “Anathem” by Neal Stephenson

I realize that as I began my last post I failed to fully express my thoughts as to why I’m building a system for writing this way. After all, why re-invent the wheel? Because a) it’s fun to make it rounder.With apologies to the Mojolicious Framework from whom I borrowed that turn of phrase.

And b) I find myself often in a similar vein of thought to Yul in the above quote from Anathem. By creating my own system, I am not bound by someone else’s thought process.

The Site Itself

It was important to me in this project to make writing come first, hence the beginning of this project as a plain markdown file with no code. But now that I’ve written this much I would like to have a proper site to contain the content. The motivation for this project is primarily to create a place of my own making in which I can record my thoughts, but that’s not the only thing.

I want this site to be a reflection of myself, and the work I’ve put into a particular skillset as well as the understanding that has come with that skillset. It’s kind of the status quo for a developer to build themselves a little portfolio site that they can target at employers or clients, but that’s not what this site is.

So nothing is off the table. I’m not going to restrict the design here as a result of who I worry might read it, or out of some desire for the end user because ultimately I am the end user here. This little project is my sandbox in which I will construct castles and knock them down as I please.

Fundamentally programming isn’t so much about having an employable skillset (though it’s a very useful side effect), it’s part of this impossible quest for perfection, or the perfect description of a problem, or the perfect language. There’s a very specific kind of thrill that comes with breaking down a problem and finding the codified description of its solution. It’s probably the closest thing we get to have as a society to magic, the wizard in a tower working on some arcane spell variety I mean.

So when all is said and done, this project is more about having something that I understand because I’ve built it myself, from scratch.