Journal

I continued with my completely pointless but very fun static site generator today, adding related posts to each post. On build, it pulls down an open-source embedding model, creates embeddings for all of the posts, and uses cosine similarity to find related posts. It then shoves a blob of JSON into a data directory and renders via an include in the post template. I’ve only checked a few of the posts, but it seems to be doing a pretty good job. If you can’t over-engineer your personal website, what can you do?

Trying to write this whilst watching the new Louis Theroux documentary and massively failing because it’s difficult to look away from the absolute car crash that I’m witnessing. Louis is great (obviously), but it’s so strange witnessing the worst parts of the internet embodied in human form. I’m thankful that I’ve surrounded myself with kind, loving, caring folks who are also just so creative, impressive and hard-working. What a joy to be able to choose your own actions, and to choose wise ones.

It struck me today that you can make your own luck simply by doing things earlier than most of the other people around you believe is reasonable. We’re in this strange world now where folks don’t need an engineering background to make pretty great software, but I decided to teach myself programming when folks in design were saying that you shouldn’t need to. I didn’t think that I needed to, I just… wanted to.

Now that we’re here, I assume things will do what they always do: just keep moving; shift over. The reason I’m teaching myself machine learning now is that it’s just the next most fun thing to me. It’s the thing that most folks in design won’t be doing, but that will increasingly be the thing that defines what software gets made, and how the world is shaped by it. I don’t want to just work with the output, I want to shape the thing itself.

The thing that you have to do, I think, is just assume that you can do it. Assume that you can do anything, really, because you probably can. If someone can do it, you can probably do it. Maybe you can even do it really well. I try to quiet the critical part of my brain and just start poking around, feeling incredibly dumb until I feel… a little less dumb. After all, don’t we all listen to the critical part of our brain too much already?

For no reasonable reason whatsoever, I sat down to write this journal entry but first decided to have Claude write a static site generator from scratch to replace Jekyll. That took about thirty minutes, which means that I don’t have time to write much of anything here now, but I am publishing the thing that I’m barely writing via my completely pointless but very joyful static site generator, which is both worse than Jekyll and infinitely more fun. I can recommend making software you don’t need to for fun.

There was a moment today where I thought I’d go and work in the garden before it got too cold. I need to put the covers on the couch cushions for the garden furniture, and I obviously couldn’t be bothered to do that, so I got a tiny camping seat out and perched my laptop on my knees like I was in the smallest plane seat in the world, t-rex arms included.

Cacio sprinted into the yard, picked up a stick, ran around in frantic circles and tried eating said stick. At this point, the neighbors dog decided it was precisely the right time to bark at her, which resulted in the predictable outcome of Cacio running in more circles, as if this is a game they play. The game of “you bark, I run, you bark at me running.”

A cloud of midges decided they wanted to join the party, specifically around my head. They might still be stuck in my hair, ears and eyeballs. So: T-rex arms, barks-galore, dizzy dog and a mouthful of midges. Not quite the relaxing, very cool time I’d imagined, but I smiled and came back inside. Sometimes things don’t work out, and that’s just fine.

We ran out of teabags tonight. That might be the most boring thing I ever write in this journal? Anyway, we ran out of teabags. We had one left. I tried to split it between us but wanted to make sure that Aneesah’s cup looked good first. I succeeded at that part, but failed at the second: my cup looked like someone had whispered the word “tea” somewhere in the vicinity.

Another glorious day here in the East Bay. Slept in again because why not? My body clearly needed it, and who am I to deny myself what I need. Quickly got ready and met friends for brunch. I’m so thankful to call them friends, and it was nice to have an easy hang with good food on a slow Sunday. Tried the biscuits with butter and jam, and was left wishing I had a cream tea. The biscuits were good, but hey, I’m an English boy.

A day in the garden after that, initially with the goal to do some gardening, but the blazing sun made “doing nothing” a considerably more appealing option, so we did that (to the extent that you can “do” nothing) and I have zero regrets. A bit of reading, a bit of sitting and listening, a bit of… eating ice lollies. Ended the day walking Cacio together and stopping off at Trader Joes to pick up ingredients for a favorite meal.

There are lots of fiddly steps involved, so we cooked together. There’s something that satisfies me about getting everything ready in fifteen bowls—300g of parmesan here, a beaten egg there… breadcrumbs, garlic, nutmeg. Mise en place, or something. It’s a pain in the ass (the dish) but it feels worth it when you sit down to eat it. Slow Sundays are for slow meals, and taking enjoyment from taking the time to make them.

I slept in today, way later than I have in a long time. It felt good, and also bad. You know that feeling when you’ve had more sleep than ever but also feel more tired than ever? Anyway, an excellent day once I’d rubbed the sleep out of my eyes. We headed to Sonoma for a tasting, and Cacio even tagged along. We drank the wine, and she ate the cheese.

The weather was perfect. Like ridiculously, suspiciously great. The kind of day that you’re lucky to get a handful of in England, but that I’ve already had a few of this year in California—and it’s only just March. It’s such a beautiful drive there, too. Every time we drive there we just keep repeating “I can’t believe we live here” or “we’re so lucky” or “I feel so blessed.” I really can’t. We really are. I really, really do.

We grabbed dinner afterwards and walked Cacio around the dimly-lit streets. She always seems to know where she’s headed, even when we have absolutely no idea where we are. I’d trust her with directions more than I’d trust myself though, to be fair. Aneesah likes to say I walk very confidently in precisely the wrong direction. As usual, she’s correct.

Long day at the end of a long week. You can tell if I’m having a long week, because I write less. I write less everywhere. I skip morning pages. I write less in this journal. I don’t write my work journal. It’s weird, because I think we often skip the things that actually help the most, or at least I do. The busier I am, the less likely I am to spend the 10 minutes with my coffee writing a todo list. The less likely I am to stop for a few minutes once an hour to breathe, stretch, and drink water. Maybe it’s just me, but probably not. This is a reminder to me (and you) to… not do that.

I was teaching a few concepts around agentic programming today, and at some point it struck me how weird and nice it is that markdown is having arguably its biggest moment yet. In a world of large language models, it turns out that plain-text enhanced with formatting and machine-readable frontmatter is a pretty useful thing to have knocking about.

I’ve been writing with markdown for years. The most important things I write, I write in markdown. I’m writing in markdown right now. There have been many times that I’ve considered using some other stack for this blog or for my private notes, but I keep coming back to markdown. There’s something so satisfying about a file vs. a database.

Markdown syntax has even snuck into other places, now. You’ll find some of it in WhatsApp and Instagram, and there are extended dialects like GitHub Flavored Markdown that give you even more to play with. John Gruber has done many great things, but bringing markdown into existence I think is still one of the best things he gifted to the world.

Who could have known that all these years later it would be the language spoken by these otherworldly tools. The language that we use to speak back, from agents.md to skills.md to the countless other places that it shows up. I have markdown files piled high from years of writing, ready now to serve some new purpose in a new world. Peculiar.