Still alive

Hello! It looks like that last post was too ambitious. I broke my weekly writing habit because life changed a lot (I moved back to Brooklyn, NY), the site was a pain to update, and the pandemic has its own set of challenges.

Work

I moved back to Brooklyn and work at Meetup.com. It's been fun to work with the amount of traffic that Meetup regularly sees and also some of the technology, like GraphQL, that I only had minimal exposure to before joining. I also have some great, really talented co-workers. I have a rough draft, The Joys and Pains of GraphQL, that has come from my experience with GraphQL that I'm currently editing.

Site

This site was originally a Gatsby site and, at first, I was sort of happy with it. I remember thinking, This feels like a lot of work for a simple blog, but thought I would adjust over time. Unfortunately, I was wrong. When you lose familiarity with a codebase and return to it weeks or months later, the warts really glare at you.

I thought about going back to Hugo or Jekyll, but I would really like to take advantage of mdx in the future. So, I went with Next.js. Initially, this was a lot of work and I can appreciate Gatsby a bit more for what it gives you out of the box; however, I feel a lot better about the static page generation and any future updates.

I think when I wrote Reflecting on One Year of Writing I was in a particularly good, ambitious mood – not unlike going to the grocey store hungry. I'm going to hold off on some of the additions in that post — but I have thought that a "Books" section would be a nice, simple addition. I like to look over other people's reading lists. Sometimes, you get hints for new books, sometimes you get hints for who that person is. I think both are neat.

Pandemic

I can't say the pandemic has been good to me, but both me and my family have been fortunate not to have been very ill. I have a deeper appreciation for life in the "before times" and all the people who have had to work to keep society functioning.

I'm strangely excited to ditch the pandemic small stalk and go back to whatever weather or MTA issue that used to occupy our day-to-day.