Hello, Again

It’s been a while.

I started this website on October 16, 2013. It was built from scratch — the first real software project I ever completed. It’s always been my favorite.

Unapologetic was a direct successor to my first website, The Axx, which I’d begun just eight months earlier. I don’t recommend rebranding less than a year after launching a project, but choosing a name that evokes poorly-masked body odor is a great way to back yourself into that particular corner. In my defense, I was 17 years old at the time.

The new name came about from an inside joke among the Apple community on that one time Jony Ive decided he was really into plastic. Jony’s love affair with bright, fun, plasticky colors was, sadly, brief. Mine was not. The goal of this site’s design from the very beginning was to let me play with color — with subtle touches of brightness and fun in an otherwise serious space. I’ve always believed that the Web should bring about joy and whimsy rather than frustration and drudgery.

I’m still quite proud of how well the original design of this website achieved that goal, but I was too green behind the ears to do everything I wanted. (I succeeded with the fun colors, but didn’t really make it on the joy and whimsy.) Thus began a decade of failed attempts at a rewrite, with ambitions always higher than first skill, later time, allowed. All the while, the site languished.

Between The Axx and Unapologetic, I wrote 211 posts in just under two years, concluding on February 9, 2015 with a post about grammar. I never really meant to stop. If I had, grammar would not have been my final word.

This year, I turned 30 years old — a complicated milestone where one grapples melodramatically with the end of their youth despite not being all that old. The existential side won a cheap victory when I tore my hamstring during a rec-league soccer game the very next day.

As they carried my old, broken body off the field, I flashed back to 13 years earlier — when my young, broken body was carried off a soccer field with a brutal arm break. Released from the obligations of competitive sports, my teenage self leveraged his newfound free time to build a website and begin to write.

Couch-bound for the first week of my 30s, I was haunted by the notion that I’d spent the entirety of my 20s thinking about resurrecting a project that I’d successfully accomplished in my teens. Apparently nothing drums up motivation like pain, déjà vu, and a quarter-life crisis. Four months later, I’m back, baby.

In the spirit of its predecessor, this website weaves flashes of bright, brilliant colors into an otherwise serious reading experience. It is written from scratch, lightweight and fast, and loads even with JavaScript disabled. It also fulfills my longtime dream for a joyful, weird, whimsical experience simmering under the surface of an ostensibly ordinary website. Poke around a bit and you just might find some surprises.

I don’t know exactly what I’ll be writing here yet. Nearly a decade into my career now, I’ll likely cover software-related topics a lot more than last time. Beyond that, I’m not sure. The goings-on of the tech industry are still rarely far from mind, but my younger self’s general optimism has sustained some heavy blows. To hazard a guess, those feelings will probably lead to a lot of words. But making promises is a great way to burn out quickly, so I commit to none here.

Maybe I’ll just write about making craft cocktails at home, or finding the best coffee in the Twin Cities. It’s a blog, after all. Figuring it out along the way is the point.