Josh's Brain Blog

As someone who works remotely, I find that it can be easy to forget the rubber duck. Being alone in an office all day and not one particularly given to talking to myself, I find that it can be hard sometimes to not fall into a gap in my thought process which precludes the rubber duck situation.

I'm a middleman when it comes to my own webserver. My sites collectively are too large to exist as separate shared hosting with a webhost, but I also want to keep them all organized together and have the flexibility of managing each individual site that would come with a colocated or private server. If you're familiar with non-enterprise web hosting at all, you've probably just said to yourself "he must be on a VPS, then," and you're exactly right.

A couple months back, I read in Wired (in hard copy, no less, because I'm one of those weirdos) Clive Thompson's column "The Next Big Blue-Collar Job Is Coding". It resonated with me at the time, but I sat on the article until I could also link to it, and now it's too late to really weigh in on it, because as soon as it hit the web it blew up. The post has nearly 125k shares on Facebook as I write this, in fact, and way more Facebook comments than any of their recent posts that don't involve America's President.

Keep your cloud backup in case of true disaster, but also keep as much around locally as possible. The most likely issue you face as a computer user or your family's IT tech is a busted or corrupted hard drive, and the more you have locally the faster you can recover and not feel the data-loss-nausea that I had for most of the last fortnight.

In this second post discussing the current design of the website you're on as you read this, I go more into detail about how I drew out the art assets for alvies.org and built it all to go together. Of course, by the time you're reading this, the technical details are out of date, but I probably won't write much more about that.

I hadn't done a whole lot with my eponymous website in a decade; not as if the thing gets a boatload of traffic, but as someone who makes his living and has his major hobbies all connected to the web, it was a bit awkward to have something quite so stale.

Why would you want to read an article about Drupal 8 when it was still in its infancy? Okay, well, fine, click the links if you insist.