my manifesto (not the scary kind, I promise)
You might be wondering why a tech worker's portfolio and blog site might be so boring and plain. The truth is that I'm tired of a framework, theme, ideology, or template for everything.
I've always told myself I want to write more, do more creative things, but then I found myself using all my time outside of work tinkering with different SSGs, themes, frameworks, the hot new things, and so on. It was like work, but for free. I felt like tools were getting in the way of being creative. I finally got so burned out on it that I stopped writing anything at all afterhours.
So, this simple website is my attempt to showcase all the cool innovative stuff I can do (in my blog and projects), while also honoring my need to leave room for tech to be creative and fun without a bunch of rules or business needs. I'm not in it for clout or max findability or going viral or any of that modern aspirational stuff.
I'm not trying to be an influencer. I'm trying to carve out a small place on the internet to talk about things that interest me, in a way that makes me feel cozy, in a way that doesn't make me feel like I'm pitching something or vying for currency in an attention economy.
This need for creative freedom is almost reactionary in a way — I can't get away with downstyle everything on the doc site I manage at my job, but I can certainly do so here. I can't use run‑on sentences for dramatic effect at work, but I can here.
I fully intend for this website to become a labyrinthine mess of professional opinions, portfolio pieces, and thoughts on the industry. It may be risky from a career perspective, but I believe that technical writing is an artform and people who would think I'm a worse tech writer for running a show like this don't understand the craft.
So welcome to my web place, using simple design, without pretense, and without rigid rules. I do enough consistency at my day job :-)
Ps I am using picocss for styling cause it turns out, I do want the site to be legible and I don't care about design, so I've outsourced that part to keep me from making the site unusable. I'm also using 11ty to generate the site because I'm adding a lot more content than I ever thought I would and I really wanted page templates, hahahaha