Skip header to navigation
Posts about this very blog: experiments, changelogs, and quiet rewrites.
Hang on, loading more…
Posts about this very blog: experiments, changelogs, and quiet rewrites.
Hang on, loading more…
In October I wrote a post about a little experiment I implemented. An experiement I wanted to build since I was a teen. Now I’m removing this experiment again.
To recap in short, back in the days when I started to create websites, I was fascinated by the idea that the design of a website (or at least a header image) depicts its own little world, with its own simulated weather and urban scenes and people living there. So I did it, with AI, which renewed the header images every 6 hours.
In October I wrote a post about a little experiment I implemented. An experiement I wanted to build since I was a teen. Now I’m removing this experiment again.
To recap in short, back in the days when I started to create websites, I was fascinated by the idea that the design of a website (or at least a header image) depicts its own little world, with its own simulated weather and urban scenes and people living there. So I did it, with AI, which renewed the header images every 6 hours.
When I was a teen, I learned how to build WordPress themes. During holidays or when school was out, I vividly remember how I sometimes sat in front of my computer for a few days and nights, and created new themes for my blog. Of course I had no blog, but having one was a cool thought. But this stuck to me, and I was really never happy with how my blogs work. Until now!
Read moreWhen I was a teen, I learned how to build WordPress themes. During holidays or when school was out, I vividly remember how I sometimes sat in front of my computer for a few days and nights, and created new themes for my blog. Of course I had no blog, but having one was a cool thought. But this stuck to me, and I was really never happy with how my blogs work. Until now!
Read moreI’ve motivated myself to write shorter posts more frequently! The previous list of headlines (which is now the Archive) added too much friction for writing down some content—not just because I had to come up with a title, but also because a short post on its own page felt a bit … lonely.
After 2 years of writing posts in GitHub Discussions, I’ve now switched to Keystatic. The writing experience is much better: it’s still in my browser, and the media handling is much better! Images and videos became a bit more cumbersome with GitHub Discussions. It wasn’t impossible, just a bit annoying. And that extra friction became an excuse to not writing down some thoughts I had.
I might have been just a wee bit too excited to release this new version. There are some minor tweaks here and there to improve, but pfft, that’s continuous deployment for you!
I’ve motivated myself to write shorter posts more frequently! The previous list of headlines (which is now the Archive) added too much friction for writing down some content—not just because I had to come up with a title, but also because a short post on its own page felt a bit … lonely.
After 2 years of writing posts in GitHub Discussions, I’ve now switched to Keystatic. The writing experience is much better: it’s still in my browser, and the media handling is much better! Images and videos became a bit more cumbersome with GitHub Discussions. It wasn’t impossible, just a bit annoying. And that extra friction became an excuse to not writing down some thoughts I had.
I might have been just a wee bit too excited to release this new version. There are some minor tweaks here and there to improve, but pfft, that’s continuous deployment for you!
I felt like posting random stuff sometimes. Not only babble about software development tips. So I added this new Offtopic section. Although I called it Stream in the Sidebar because Offtopic is a long word?
Anyways, what started with a new category ended in a switch from Markdown to MDX and a dark mode, mainly because I’m often looking at my blog at night and it hurt me poor eyes. I’m not completely done, there are a few things I’d like to add and improve, but shipping is good.
I imagined some cool aurora borealis vibes going on, but didn’t yet spent too much time in Figma to make it a bit more like I imagined. I need to change some pictures of previous posts to fit into the dark theme. And some old posts were moved into the Offtopic section because it made more sense. In summary: things happened.
I felt like posting random stuff sometimes. Not only babble about software development tips. So I added this new Offtopic section. Although I called it Stream in the Sidebar because Offtopic is a long word?
Anyways, what started with a new category ended in a switch from Markdown to MDX and a dark mode, mainly because I’m often looking at my blog at night and it hurt me poor eyes. I’m not completely done, there are a few things I’d like to add and improve, but shipping is good.
I imagined some cool aurora borealis vibes going on, but didn’t yet spent too much time in Figma to make it a bit more like I imagined. I need to change some pictures of previous posts to fit into the dark theme. And some old posts were moved into the Offtopic section because it made more sense. In summary: things happened.
In his blog post Take Care of Your Blog, Robin Rendle wrote some career advice:
Blog your heart! Blog about something you’ve learned, blog about something you’re interested in. Blog about cameras or HTML or that one browser bug you’ve noticed this morning […]
Ignore the analytics and the retweets though. There will be lonely, barren years of no one looking at your work. There will be blog posts that you adore that no one reads and there’ll be blog posts you spit out in ten minutes that take the internet by storm.
That’s exactly the philosophy I want to follow here. And that’s also the reason why I focused on building a blog which allows me to publish content as frictionless as possible.1
Chris’ blog inspired me to finally start blogging again. His blog is a mixture of smaller and larger development topics, mixed with other thoughts and stories from his life. Sometimes I messaged him with some small development thoughts or things I learned that day, and he often responded with “that would be a nice little blog post”.
And he’s right! You just need to overcome the thoughts “that’s not worthy of publishing” and “nobody cares”. At least I had to overcome them.
In his blog post Take Care of Your Blog, Robin Rendle wrote some career advice:
Blog your heart! Blog about something you’ve learned, blog about something you’re interested in. Blog about cameras or HTML or that one browser bug you’ve noticed this morning […]
Ignore the analytics and the retweets though. There will be lonely, barren years of no one looking at your work. There will be blog posts that you adore that no one reads and there’ll be blog posts you spit out in ten minutes that take the internet by storm.
That’s exactly the philosophy I want to follow here. And that’s also the reason why I focused on building a blog which allows me to publish content as frictionless as possible.1
Chris’ blog inspired me to finally start blogging again. His blog is a mixture of smaller and larger development topics, mixed with other thoughts and stories from his life. Sometimes I messaged him with some small development thoughts or things I learned that day, and he often responded with “that would be a nice little blog post”.
And he’s right! You just need to overcome the thoughts “that’s not worthy of publishing” and “nobody cares”. At least I had to overcome them.
More than 15 years ago, I had this idea to autogenerate the header image of my website based on the current time of day, season, location, and a simulated weather pattern that naturally progresses. It fascinated me to have a long-running, realistic-feeling, autonomous system that changes itself without my involvement—like its own little world. I liked the idea to open my own site and being surprised by what I see. “Oh, it’s snowing!”, then seeing the snow melt away some time later, or observe the bleakness of misty autumn days.
Back then, I tinkered with layering PNGs on top of each other to create “random” scenes, but it looked terrible. I can design websites, but I can’t draw nice pictures.
I never ended up doing it because 1) I didn’t miraculously become a good artist, and 2) who cares.
Well, I care. I’m older now, and the fascination is definitely weaker, but I still thought about it every year. When my most favorite time of year starts, I get this itch. And this year, I finally scratched it.
AI made this much easier to solve. Not just for creating the images, but also for simulating the weather progression based on the time of day, the season, and previous days. Everything is now truly unpredictable, there isn’t a single line of code where I can already guess what will happen next.
New scenes get generated four times a day, and I feed the AI with previous days to create a natural progression.
I’m storing all the prompts, images and weather simulations (in a Railway Bucket of course).
More than 15 years ago, I had this idea to autogenerate the header image of my website based on the current time of day, season, location, and a simulated weather pattern that naturally progresses. It fascinated me to have a long-running, realistic-feeling, autonomous system that changes itself without my involvement—like its own little world. I liked the idea to open my own site and being surprised by what I see. “Oh, it’s snowing!”, then seeing the snow melt away some time later, or observe the bleakness of misty autumn days.
Back then, I tinkered with layering PNGs on top of each other to create “random” scenes, but it looked terrible. I can design websites, but I can’t draw nice pictures.
I never ended up doing it because 1) I didn’t miraculously become a good artist, and 2) who cares.
Well, I care. I’m older now, and the fascination is definitely weaker, but I still thought about it every year. When my most favorite time of year starts, I get this itch. And this year, I finally scratched it.
AI made this much easier to solve. Not just for creating the images, but also for simulating the weather progression based on the time of day, the season, and previous days. Everything is now truly unpredictable, there isn’t a single line of code where I can already guess what will happen next.
New scenes get generated four times a day, and I feed the AI with previous days to create a natural progression.
I’m storing all the prompts, images and weather simulations (in a Railway Bucket of course).
In my last post I covered my decision to use GitHub Discussions as CMS for my posts. I’m going to build it using Next.js, because that’s what I already use a lot, and it has some features which will become quite useful. Let’s get cracking!
Read moreIn my last post I covered my decision to use GitHub Discussions as CMS for my posts. I’m going to build it using Next.js, because that’s what I already use a lot, and it has some features which will become quite useful. Let’s get cracking!
Read moreI don’t like many of my development-related blog posts for one reason: I often feel like I spend too much time explaining the problem instead of getting straight to the point.
Understanding the problem is just as important as understanding how to solve it. So I don’t want to skip explaining the problem properly. And I want to include readers who might not be familiar with the topic. But whenever I start writing, I imagine readers rolling their eyes in light of the “obviousness” of it all.
I often think back to “Words To Avoid in Educational Writing” by Chris Coyier. He warns against using certain common words that make readers feel dumb. Just because you find something obvious doesn’t mean they do.
I’m certainly guilty of using those words myself sometimes, but the message stuck with me. That’s why I always try to explain problems thoroughly: because the reader might not know this yet, and it could be valuable knowledge for them, and I want them to feel included.
Still, I can’t shake the insecurity. Whenever I explain a problem, I worry readers will think that I’m a bit of a dum-dum for explaining something “everyone” already knows. Even when editing my posts before publishing them, I spend most of my time refining the problem explanation, trying to make it not too long but still explain everything.
Do I explain problems too much? You can tell me, I can take it!
Chris Coyier is well-known for blogging a mind-boggling amout of posts on CSS-Tricks (which is now owned by DigitalOcean). But I’m not going to talk about his stuff on CSS-Tricks, but instead about his personal blog chriscoyier.net.
Chris’ blog feels like a stream of consciousness. It’s just what he’s thinking about at the moment, without any deeper meaning or learning. And yet, those thoughts are still interesting and fun to read. Annoyed at System Fonts in macOS? Just blog about it. Orange favicons work great for light and dark themes? Why not write down that thought, then notice that Safari is weird, and end it with “Time for a nap”. It’s refreshing to see someone share their half-baked ideas without feeling the need to make a grand conclusion or provide a takeaway for the reader. You can just end your post if you don’t know what else to write.
It feels like a conversation with a friend. Sometimes you just want to talk about something that’s been on your mind without worrying about whether it’s profound or even fully formed. It’s totally normal in a conversation to suddenly end your thought mid-sentence with a big ol’ shrug. And that’s what his blog feels like to me.
Maybe we sometimes try too hard to offer some kind of education or to present ourselves as experts? At least I sometimes feel that way. But I don’t think that’s necessary. It’s nice to take a break from expert content and just read something that’s relatable and human.
Chris has definitely inspired me to post more half-baked thoughts. And to not think about words and sentences and publishing too much. Just write it down, press the big button, and continue with your day.
I don’t like many of my development-related blog posts for one reason: I often feel like I spend too much time explaining the problem instead of getting straight to the point.
Understanding the problem is just as important as understanding how to solve it. So I don’t want to skip explaining the problem properly. And I want to include readers who might not be familiar with the topic. But whenever I start writing, I imagine readers rolling their eyes in light of the “obviousness” of it all.
I often think back to “Words To Avoid in Educational Writing” by Chris Coyier. He warns against using certain common words that make readers feel dumb. Just because you find something obvious doesn’t mean they do.
I’m certainly guilty of using those words myself sometimes, but the message stuck with me. That’s why I always try to explain problems thoroughly: because the reader might not know this yet, and it could be valuable knowledge for them, and I want them to feel included.
Still, I can’t shake the insecurity. Whenever I explain a problem, I worry readers will think that I’m a bit of a dum-dum for explaining something “everyone” already knows. Even when editing my posts before publishing them, I spend most of my time refining the problem explanation, trying to make it not too long but still explain everything.
Do I explain problems too much? You can tell me, I can take it!
Chris Coyier is well-known for blogging a mind-boggling amout of posts on CSS-Tricks (which is now owned by DigitalOcean). But I’m not going to talk about his stuff on CSS-Tricks, but instead about his personal blog chriscoyier.net.
Chris’ blog feels like a stream of consciousness. It’s just what he’s thinking about at the moment, without any deeper meaning or learning. And yet, those thoughts are still interesting and fun to read. Annoyed at System Fonts in macOS? Just blog about it. Orange favicons work great for light and dark themes? Why not write down that thought, then notice that Safari is weird, and end it with “Time for a nap”. It’s refreshing to see someone share their half-baked ideas without feeling the need to make a grand conclusion or provide a takeaway for the reader. You can just end your post if you don’t know what else to write.
It feels like a conversation with a friend. Sometimes you just want to talk about something that’s been on your mind without worrying about whether it’s profound or even fully formed. It’s totally normal in a conversation to suddenly end your thought mid-sentence with a big ol’ shrug. And that’s what his blog feels like to me.
Maybe we sometimes try too hard to offer some kind of education or to present ourselves as experts? At least I sometimes feel that way. But I don’t think that’s necessary. It’s nice to take a break from expert content and just read something that’s relatable and human.
Chris has definitely inspired me to post more half-baked thoughts. And to not think about words and sentences and publishing too much. Just write it down, press the big button, and continue with your day.
