Personal Dev Blog

I’m a developer and computer graphics researcher. I gather an immense amount of experience and knowledge from other people’s personal development blogs. I’ve never really had the guts to post on Stack Overflow for all the reasons we joke about, but also I’ve just never really had problems that didn’t have an existing answer out there. That started to change when my educational career changed from writing code that already exists in undergrad to writing code that doesn’t in graduate school. This of course is ignoring that Stack Overflow is basically on life support and is basically a glorified dataset in 2026.

It’s much more common for me now to have to hack together solutions for library versioning and linking to get disparate parts of a cobbled-together codebase to play nice. There have been countless times that I was only able to figure out a solution to something from the dev blog of someone with a similarly odd tech stack. So I’d like to give back a bit and hope that people can find some of my experience useful.

Lamentations on AI

We took the internet of my youth for granted, and now it’s gone. What used to be “surfing the web” is now simply going to the same 3 websites over and over again all day with an anxious compulsion. I fear that inorganic content created to manipulate, deceive, or sell dominates the state of online social interactions. But it doesn’t need to be that way. There is no reason why the old way doesn’t work. Nothing stops anyone from taking a junk old computer from recycling and throwing a personal website on it. Now, doing so securely is another story (One I hope to poorly document on this site), but that world still exists.

I’m not going to pretend that I’m the only person feeling this or the only blog on the internet. But it’s pretty easy to see that ads, SEO garbage, listicle nonsense, or, more recently, AI slop dominate the majority of small websites. I hope for this to be something different. No ads, absolutely no slop. Just mistakes made by humans and money being incinerated by humans to host it. No em dashes or overuse or “if X then Y” statements. Just garbage written by a guy who probably has nothing useful to say, yet does it anyway

Digital Well-being

The modern internet and technology landscape has been described as “constant PvP”. That is, seemingly every interaction is between you and someone that wants something from you. Often they want your attention or money, and you want a distraction or content. But increasingly it feels as though this relationship contains a power imbalance that is simply too much to bear. I’ve begun to question the absurdity of digital practices that we just accept as commonplace. Take notifications, for example. Unless you carefully curate who and what is allowed to notify you, you probably get email notifications and app notifications on your desktop, your phone, and your wrist. Please for a moment just consider the absolute absurdity from this common scenario:

You’re eating dinner with a loved one, and you get a tap on your write from your smartwatch. The tap is to alert you to an email notification from Amazon about some upcoming discount. Just think about that for a second. You’re carefully attending someone that actually matters, when your attention is suddenly wrenched away, just for a split second, because a marketing executive knows it improves retention. How completely absurd. How insulting. Get out of my fucking head.

And yes, I know that those notifications can be turned off. But they’re on by default, and unless you religiously uncheck boxes, you’re bound to experience something like this. Maybe it’s a notification from a food delivery app enticing you with an offer. Of course you have notifications for Uber Eats on, how else would you know when your food is on the way? Why do the services we pay for also demand attention from us as additional payment? Why is this something we allow, are okay with, and accept is just part of participating in modern life?

Attention is a precious resource being plundered from us an unprecedented scale. I want to share my journey to take some of mine back.

Just to Write

I’m a graphics researcher. And a researcher that can’t effectively communicate their ideas is of no use to science because their ideas will never leave their head. This is my rationalization that writing and blogging as a hobby isn’t a waste of time or a distraction from my research, but instead something that helps me sharpen a vital skill.

Once I was done taking English classes, my writing education essentially stopped. Students in my field see writing assignments as largely a waste of time. I had the occasional essay needed for an elective class, but not much else for writing. So I want this blog to also function as a way for me to hone my scientific voice and persuasive style in order to be a more effective communicator.

Hobbies

I do things for fun. Sometimes cool things. Many things pertaining to owning an old house. Hopefully even interesting things too. I’d like someplace to share them that doesn’t enrich the richest men on the planet. So maybe you’ll find some stuff I’m proud of here eventually.

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