Ending the Season Images

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.

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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).

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!

Changelog, November 2024

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!

Blogging like Chris Coyier

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.