I’m starting out this new blog with a very meta post about my blogging habits, past, present, and future.

Past

I was pretty active with writing from about 2010-2015 on Blogger. I wrote a number of things, large and small, mostly related to things technical and/or creative and/or crafty. It was great. I’m glad I wrote all that I wrote can look through my old posts and remember the myriad things I created.

Some of my favorite posts about my most “famous” projects include:

• My experience creating Feminist Hacker Barbie
• The saga of creating my wedding cake topper via scanning with a Kinect and then hacking into a website to get the 3D data out, which I also spoke about at !!Con in 2020
• Two different posts about the collaborative drawing mobile app Sketch-a-bit that I created with my partner

There were also totally random things like:

• How I fit two plastic Adirondack chairs into my car, which has helped at least one other person in the world
• A month-long daily drawing challenge, Draw-a-day December which is where the black and white illustration of me that I use in some places around the internet came from

Present (If the present includes up until very recently when I was not blogging)

In reflecting on why I stopped blogging, I think the reasons were:

1. I started working at a stealth startup in 2015 and couldn’t talk about it, and I didn’t have a lot of time for other projects. Now it can say I was the first employee at GrokStyle, which partnered with IKEA at one point to put visual search in their AR IKEA Place app, and then got bought by Facebook (which I did not join).
   • I was a grad student during my previous blogging prime, and felt that I had the ability to be open about my work and side projects. I also had time, flexibility, and interesting, smart, creative people around me.
2. I got pregnant and had a baby, and while that is also a super rewarding and interesting project, I didn’t want to write as much about it publicly. There will certainly be SOME kid-related stuff here, though.
3. The blogging and social media ecosystem has changed and fractured. Blogger felt weird, fancy blogs by other companies like Medium were a thing, and my own sharing of project-like-things got shallower and split among tweets and instagram posts (and more recently mastodon and a tiny bit of cohost).
4. The one time I tried to set up my own blog via a static site generator several years back, and/or through Github pages, it did not go well. I had an unsuccessful battle installing ruby or a ruby package manager or something.

Future (Including a little bit of the present where I start writing again)

Here I am with a new blogging home. I have plans! I’ll write about them next!

I used Hugo to set up this blog because a quick skim of the internet said things like “good out of the box experience!” and “docker” and “themes”. I’m having a great time so far… I love it when computing is easy, when I feel like I know what I’m doing, and all the pieces fit together.

I’m optimistic about the future of my own writing. Over the past few years, I’ve felt like I have things to say or to share, but for various reasons, I haven’t been able to. Mostly they’ve been internal impediments, like being busy or overwhelmed. I also felt that I didn’t have a good outlet, or the outlets were (are) controlled by big problematic corporations, or there were too many questions of who I was sharing for, why, and what sort of response I was hoping to get.

My own website, my own domain, a small audience, less room for likes and comments and mechanisms for driving engagement* and hijacking my attention, and the ability to write longer form posts with visuals and formatting all sound pretty appealing and healthy for me right now.

* Who am I kidding, I will definitely be tooting some of these posts and putting google analytics on this blog and hoping some people really do see it and like it! 😂

Also, I’m working on open source software at a great little company ODK that is making a big impact. It’s no secret what I’m working on day-to-day, my coding activity is on github if you wanna see, and while I will probably mostly write about personal projects, it’s so nice to know I can write about work and things or that may intersect or be adjacent to what I’m doing for work. In addition to the open work environment, I also get to be virtually connected with some of the cool, smart, supportive people who were around during my previous good-blogging-times.

Great. That’s it. I don’t remember how to finish posts. The image at the top is something I made with watercolor and pen that was inspired by a tiktok by @andrea.nelson.art.