Let's get started shall we?

Let's get started

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I'll give a brief intro to what I do and what you can expect me to cover with this.

I started work as a self-taught web developer and these days I work across a spectrum of technical work including design and architectural things. I'm more than 20 years past my first website and 10 years past first getting paid to do this. Along the way I've been a Web Master, Team Lead, Tech Lead, CTO, solo freelancer.

Currently I run my own business, doing mostly contract work for a diverse set of clients. That's what allows me to spend some time writing things. On the personal side, me and my wife grow vegetables, I try to build open source things, I take on more projects than I can feasibly complete (a habit I've gotten out of professionally, not so much at home).

I've been thinking a lot about sustainability, not in the environmental sense, rather about how we can build for the longer term. That's why my website has very little nonsense in it aside from my writing and such. Whatever stats I want to follow I attempt to divine them from the server logs like the 90's kid I am. My site is a static thing. I actively avoid tracking and unnecessary JS. My site doesn't break unless the hosting breaks. I can host it on S3 with CloudFront but I could move it to anything else as fast as I can update the DNS settings or spin up a new domain. I like how fast it loads. I like that we'll be able to parse it until we forget what HTML is.

Sustainability means building with a reasonable amount of quality. It means building things that can be maintained. It means building with resource use in mind. It means having an idea how it can be feasible economically. Not everything needs to make money but then that needs to be in the plan. If you build a small utility in Electron you are using a sledgehammer to drive a nail. This is not a criticism of the sledgehammers. What we build should be fit to purpose. And I feel that our industry has become lax in the face of increasing performance.

What kind of tech makes this feeling go away? Things like Nerves, a resiliency-focused platform for IoT devices. MySensors.org which lets people build sensors networks with low-power devices that do simple things well. It lets a sensor run for 19 months on 2xAA batteries. I like Scenic, a functional UI framework for Elixir that renders directly through OpenGL. No web involved.

I like the distributed, the resilient and the simple. I want the performant, the purposeful and the efficient.

I want software to get out of our way, I want the trade-offs between business needs and user needs to align better. I don't want invasive ads or user data trading to be our only venue for economic sustainability.

With the ranting done for now. I will attempt to hand you only the most interesting of the news I read, you will get suggestions on my most beloved podcasts. And I will write. For whatever that is worth to you.

Thank you again for signing up. My aspiration is to treat your attention with respect. I'll even try to edit myself.

Until next time
- Lars Wikman