My daughter said she was proud of me today. She also used the word crazy, which I hope was about the speed rather than a diagnosis.
I built a production web app in under 3 hours. On my first day homeschooling our son. Teacher training day.
Microsoft was sending my emails to the wrong person, every single time.
I had just finished building spam protection for my self-hosted scheduling system. Everything looked perfect in the logs. Emails were being sent to the right addresses. But when I checked my inbox, nothing. Every organiser notification meant for me was landing in the attendee's mailbox instead.
Hammy the hamster's escape and home renovation.
Our hamster liked climbing the stairs in our house. We had a chinchilla called Manwell and Hammy the hamster.
I wanted a journaling system but ended up with a personal data hub.
Two weeks ago I was staring at a blank screen, unable to create my year-in-review. Now I have years of scattered data in a single, queryable knowledge base that loads fast on both desktop and mobile.
Subscriptions in WordPress are my last SaaS dependencies and I am getting rid of them for good.
Even though I host WordPress on my own infrastructure, I don't particularly like it. Not just from a cost perspective but also the management overhead, with almost daily plugin updates.
I had my data. Now I needed somewhere to put it.
Obsidian stores everything as plain markdown files with no database and no cloud lock-in. Just text files I own and can read with any editor.
I discovered my website was down by chance today.
The connection looked healthy from the outside, but the real issue was buried deep in the database logs: a configuration problem that my existing monitoring didn't detect. The fix was a one-line change once I could actually see what was happening.
Running keeps me alive. Staying alive to care for my wife and children.
I'm sharing this while sitting on a park bench overlooking the lake immediately after finishing, before my stretching, as i need to get it out, raw and unfiltered.
I felt naked at a client site last week.
Not as naked as when I went to The Rocky Horror Picture Show as Frank-N-Furter. Trust me, you don't want to see the photo, it would scar you for life. If you do then you are very naughty.
Sometimes I think my mind lives in the gutter, anyway ...
My wife Charlotte is going to find out now.
When she was sleeping after a night shift I would entertain my son by holding him upside down and walking him across the ceiling singing:
Spider-Pig, Spider-Pig, Does whatever a Spider-Pig does. Can he swing from a web? No, he can't, he's a pig. Look out, he is a Spider-Pig!
We both thought it was hilarious.