Time to get blogging again

I've been meaning to do this for ages. Last time I wrote anything on a blog, Britain hadn't voted to cut its nose off to spite its face, I'd started doing C# dev work on the Sitecore CMS and I was working at Box UK. Not a single one of these things are still true.

I won't go back over the folly of replacing a successful socio-economic political arrangement with a slogan on the side of a bus. It occupies too much of my mind and will continue until I'm dead, I expect. Got to get used to living in a country that elected to sleep in a racing car bed like Kirk Van Houten.

I ditched C# and Sitecore, partly due to having to work with the single most unlikeable developer ever to stride about with unfettered self-importance in skinny jeans, and partly down to finding the ecosystem really miserable. I'd fallen for JavaScript, both in the browser and on the server, and decided to take my attention that way. I found myself working on a React project for a big client and it all just... clicked.

I moved on from Box UK to work with my best pal from school, remotely. That was the start of 2017 (so I was well versed in working from home when The Event occurred). Lots of JavaScript, front and backend, just like I wanted.

I've tried to get started with a personal website again so many times over the past few years and stalled every time for one reason or another. The biggest problem has been that I've wanted to do the whole thing, using a headless CMS like Strapi in the background and a static site generator like Next.js for the frontend, because I've wanted to show off. This has obviously been unsuccessful! On my most recent mooch around the open source offerings I spotted that the default theme for Ghost now is really, really nice - and Ghost is what my blog was running on last time, albeit multiple major versions ago. So, here we are - blogging on Ghost again. For infrastructure nerds, I'm running CapRover to manage Docker on dedicated hardware in Paris. I like all of these products.

So...

That's a very quick rundown of where we are, based off what I remember from when I last blogged. But there's much more!

• I got diagnosed with Asperger's or Autism Spectrum Disorder or whatever the preferred title is these days. I'm happy with either.
• Too many people died. Too many pets died.
• Different car. Citroen Berlingo Multispace, which is great (if a bit of an old man's car). Absurdly practical and made the drive to and from London the week after I got it a breeze. The sense of security you get from a large car in London compared to a small car is palpable.
• Covid-19 led to Long Covid. 11 months since I contracted it, I've still got horrendous tinnitus (which wasn't on the list of symptoms for far too long) and I still get very fatigued. My brainfog isn't as bad as it was, at least at the moment. Emergency naps are A Thing.
• I've got ever more into electronics, and making noisy things especially. I blame Look Mum No Computer and his superb Discourse forum.
• I'm building a Cyberdeck, and spamming my Instagram account with photos of 3D prints as it progresses (and apologising to 99% of the audience) made me decide I needed to get back to a blog.

Finally

I'll try not to leave it six years until I touch this again!