I decided to make this website a while ago 2021. I didn't have a beard then, I accidentally moved to Dallas, Texas after attempting to flee from Covid-19 after living in New York City for almost 10 years. I didn't know anyone except family and my then fiance (now wife!) and it appeared there was a semi-decent chance that the world was ending (or at least yours might if you go outside).

Ultimately, inevitably, long-winded-ly I am trying to say that I had a lot of time on my hands. I decided hell bro - I have taken to saying `bro` quite a bit - let's hand roll this thing. Make a website where you write the css _from scratch_, set up a dev environment on ec2. Handle linux daemon issues manually; setup a jenkins instance for your deploy pipeline; handroll your ngnix server and https certs. I at least used flask and didn't decide to try and write a web framework from scratch - but it seems like I was close.

Currently, I'm writing this in 2025. It's been a fair amount of time since I first setup this blog and a lot has changed! I moved to California! I got married (yay wife!) But! I don't really remember how to do any of the things I listed above. What I do remember is that it was a colossal pain in the butt - jenkins broke down all the time, the certs need to be renewed every three months, and I have a pile of css that is largely incomprehensible to me now.

Writing this in 2025 I have the privilege (and perhaps terror) of paying a reasonable subscription for an LLM to engage with, mess with, remove the cruft and improve that css just because I asked it somewhat vague questions and it gave me what I wanted (and more?). After that I just popped this bad boy onto render(.com I'm not affiliated with them other than using their free tier services) and this website appeared!

So now I can do more with what the machines have given me - and I guess do something human. Write some posts for the blog instead of configure ip addresses. Touch grass, walk my dog, swim in the San Francisco Bay (it's cold and I have gotten used to it - I also appreciate any opportunity to talk about it). Thank goodness, and the machines, that we can go outside again.