I like to travel intentionally light. I also like to make sure I bring enough of the right gadgets. Economical clothing and toiletry decisions aside, I tend to overpack technical items as well as downtime gadgets. Sadly, I have to remind myself that I'm not a toddler that needs all his toys. I'm als...

Every time I try to get further away from Google, they find a way to dig its claws in. This time it's with YouTube Music, a service I've always been reluctant to give much of a chance. I've been a bit of a lost soul the last few years, and I decided I was going to drop Spotify. This was some time in...

Yet again, I was deceived by the Amazon Web Services (AWS) console. Now it doesn't help that my notes never seem to marry up with the current state of the UI. This time the issue was with a small oversight on my part when looking at the NAT gateway list. The task I set out to accomplish was whitelis...

overly long exhale... I hate right now. It's not even because I'm going to officially be mid-40s tomorrow. It's because I feel like life in tech is a perverted version of Groundhog Day. But instead of living out the same scenario over and over, it's being stuck in purgatory being asked one or both o...

I love Eleventy, but I think I made a mistake in how I structure my sites. I don't consider blogs and other static sites the same way I think about coding projects. I don't toss everything inside of a src/ directory so my site content lives alongside files like README.md and I never thought much of ...

I got some unfortunate news recently. My hairstylist of the last half decade is moving away. Not only is she moving, but she's moving soon. Like, "this is your last haircut with me" soon. Honestly, this isn't too shocking, as she's always had a mercurial streak. Her globetrotting has always been pre...

The generative AI wave has made it very apparent to me that the world is absolutely out to get software engineers. I don't remember feeling this way over low code and no code solutions when they emerged to take my job. Right now though, I feel like a witch and everybody is carrying a match. The thin...

I've long been fascinated with how many people there are out there with my name. Not my first name, but my full name. It's not even that there are too many to count. It's that while most don't physically look like me, on paper many of them look exactly like me. The common theme tends to be "makes mu...

At one point copy and paste was a technological marvel. Eventually it became a development pattern. Blindly copying snippets from around the web into text editors or riskier, directly into your terminal. Today the workflow has shifted from copying and pasting from StackOverflow to copying and pastin...

The wife (Jen, That Girl) and I cleaned out my closet today. I tried on every single piece of clothing I own. It was a rewarding experience to share with her. It was also emotionally draining and time-consuming. And that's why I'm writing about it. I tend to write posts the day they are published. I...

I don't have any resolutions for 2026. I'll touch on 2025, but I'm not here to dissect 2025. Rather, I'm working on living with a bit more intention instead of trackable goals. I'm sick of tracking things to the point of mental and bodily fatigue. In a world full of robot slop, I'm a human being and...

I know, I'm late as fuck to the party. The thing is, I'm not a fan of Flatpak, or Snap, or even Dockerizing things for the sake of using containers. I like to stick as close to the system's package manager as possible. This is why I like Arch Linux and more specifically the AUR (Arch User Repository...