I’ve not posted for a long time. A lot of things have changed since I last wrote, and this post is probably not the best place to recount all of them. Indeed many things haven’t changed, but the highlights..
I’m still living in New York, but I bought a coop in Brooklyn and moved, which has been great. I’m surprised at how quickly I have felt at home and rooted. The sequence of changes in my life that brought me there are simple, really, but I’ve struggled to make sense of things even so. The fact that I am aware of development is both a great comfort, but it has been hard to write about my life with confidence.
I replaced my tea habit with a coffee habit. I attend yoga classes regularly. I sing Sacred Harp (and sometimes other shaped notes). I Morris dance with the Bowery Boys, the Men’s team in New York City, and continue to dance with Braintrust Morris, an kind of butch Morris team with a spiritual center in the Midwest.
I’m still working on the same kinds of developer documentation, build systems, and software development projects for the same company as before. I still think open source software is important. I am really interested in helping people develop technological literacy and understanding. I want to work on improving infrastructure for developers and development. I use Linux extensively, write a lot of Python, tinker with Go and Common Lisp, and live and breathe in Emacs.
Life is good. Life is difficult. Life is.
I look forward to writing about it here.
So the blog looks different. I changed some things:
I switched from using ikiwiki to using Sphinx and an extension called ablog. I wanted to use a system that I was familiar with and could hack on (that’s Sphinx, which is the core of the tool chain I use at work.) Also, I wanted to use reStructuredText, which I prefer.
Ikiwiki is great software, and I quite enjoy it’s architecture and use. The problem is that it’s not in particularly active development, the code base is in Perl (which I don’t know, and except for ikiwiki, have no reason to learn,) and the project has probably peaked in terms of its adoption curve. To boot, my goals and user story aren’t totally inline it’s goals and user stories.
Sphinx isn’t totally right for a blogging engine either, but it’s solid. I actively develop and maintain tools around Sphinx. Indeed, I was able to make some small changes in ablog that shaved about a third of the time off of the total build time. Not bad.
It took a lot of time to convert all the posts to the new format, but now that everything is in order and the tools are usable it is time to start writing again.
It’s good to be home.