I turned forty earlier this month. Fifteen days ago, in fact. Took the day off. Woke up late. I think I did some laundry. Might have played a little of Life Is Strange: True Colors but quickly got bored. My wife made buffalo cauliflower wings and a lemon tart with shortbread crust—the same birthday dinner she's made the past three or four years, since the first time I had it and practically fell to my knees.

So it was a good, chill birthday. The best kind, in my opinion. But I've also been feeling the typical midlife dread. Had a dermatology checkup recently for some itchy skin, which turned into a conversation about a questionable mole, which I get to go back and have biopsied later today (”Don’t lose any sleep over it,” the doc told me during the last visit, but sometimes that’s easier said than done). Also had my first colonoscopy last week, five years earlier than most because of some family history.

So death has been on my mind, and all the things I’d still like to do before death—and all the things I’d like to stop doing to do more of the things I’d like to do.

I think that’s part of what’s occasioned my return to this space.

I built this site four years ago, as a showcase for my early projects as a software engineer, but since then I haven’t had much use for it. The blog was an early addition, but what exactly was I going to say there? I never had any idea. I posted an initial entry, then a second eight months later, in the middle of the pandemic, then nothing. And the site otherwise sat inert. The homepage displayed a couple of intro paragraphs I never updated. Links on the portfolio page died as old Heroku-based projects got deactivated after I stopped paying to keep them running. The form on the contact page took in not a single submission (and why would it when I was doing so little with the site, given that I was busy with a full-time coding job I already enjoyed and was learning from?).

This had, in short, become just another forgotten, neglected corner of the internet.

And then I started looking at Paul Ford’s old website, ftrain.com. It’s a beautiful place, the kind of Web 1.0 DIY organized mess that I sometimes wish we could get back to. I’ve already deleted my Facebook account. My Instagram timeline is ninety percent ads and suggested posts from strangers. Nearly all the people I once kept up with on Twitter have abandoned ship as Elon prepares to start charging for the service (and I’ll be joining them if it happens, now that I’m on Bluesky; I just want to stick it out as long as possible). TikTok’s still interesting, but it feels so passive, built for the mindless scroll, not the building of a community.

So I’ve been feeling like maybe the longform blog is due for a comeback, and maybe this can just be a space for that, nothing more. And why not add to the fun by bypassing all the usual blogging platforms (Tumblr, Medium, good ol’ Wordpress) to make something from scratch? I want to follow Katie Notopoulos’s call and relearn “to appreciate areas of the internet that are small.”

I’ve torn down most of the site for now. Goodbye nav bar, goodbye halfhearted old blog posts, goodbye about, portfolio, and contacts pages. Maybe some things will come back or get modified as I try to think about how to make this a space that feels worthwhile, but first I want to focus on the text.

What do I want to say?