Back on the wagon

Hey, it’s been a while. Sorry about that.

For the past few months I’ve increasingly felt the tug to express thoughts and such, but while most of the world now does that on Twitter, as with Facebook I don’t feel like I can participate on there without condoning some of the awful aspects of social media.

So I’m resurrecting this site, in the hopes that I can write a bit more here to scratch that itch.

Obviously there was no way I could possibly resume writing here without a total overhaul of the design and backend. And then having spent days on it, learning Tachyons in the process, I flicked back to the previous design and, y’know what, it actually wasn’t that bad. But anyway, we’re here now.

Speaking of Tachyons, I did read an interesting article about CSS utility classes and “separation of concerns” that has finally helped me understand the motivations that have driven front-end developers away from “semantic” CSS. As primarily a backend developer, I struggle to shake the dream of writing simple markup for a “thing” and then having different CSS render it appropriately in whatever contexts it might appear, but this helped me understand the journey. I want to re-read that article, because I have a hunch that the destination it describes isn’t actually that far away from the “semantic” one I hope for, just that the CSS might end up being dynamically composed from utility classes by a pre-processor. Maybe.

Some random thoughts I’ve had on return to this site and the codebase behind it:

Anyway, I’m back. Or am I? I think I am. I hope I am.

I’m back.