Le Troisième Sera Succès

I've maintained Benja!, a blog attempting to document my insatiable range of interests, since 2016. Unashamedly started as a (quite successful!) boost to my hiring qualifications as a junior engineer, the content I've managed to write, sporadic as it may be, has slipped and slid over the years of adulthood. Today, I'd call it a very reluctant exercise in journalling, mixed with maintaining some semblance of focus on the skills and knowledge that underly the things I work on.

Why reluctant? I ask myself this regularly, and others ask me too. One answer is clinical: acknowledging my ADHD has helped me accept some of my more frustrating mental patterns. Treating things, and working within a framework of understanding my mind has helped me set aside the time and mental space I need to write. I do think I also experience some anxiety when putting my words into the public realm - I set very high expectations for them as a result, and that takes even more time to craft. When a blog makes you no income, takes a lot to update, and brings you mostly negative emotions, why would I keep pushing things out?

But I will forever enjoy the experience of creating, and creating works here does bring me satisfaction! Another complication is the medium where I work; creating physical objects, be they furniture, electronics, established avocado trees, or bike lanes, are out there, requiring a lot of work to produce a web-accessible facsimile. Photos need to be archived, edited, cropped, captioned, and that only provides a two-dimensional window.

One means of incorporating my work into a web-friendly viewport is to simply create more web-visible things. Whether that's an applet-based demonstration of an algorithm, an interactive CAD model, or increasing my collaboration with friends and associates who are experts at digital creation, I'm encouraging myself to keep this connection in mind when developing in the real world.

You might notice the site structure and aesthetic has changed slightly. I made the decision to leave Wordpress' walled garden and rebuild the site in a less-walled self host of Ghost. Not only is this framework easier for me to write in, affordable to self host, and supportive of some commercial activity in the future, but its implementation on modern web frameworks makes it easer to integrate custom creations, of which I am finding myself creating more of.

I think that's all I have for now - Please "subscribe" for more posts! I'm working on a few ( I'm not talking about the drafts...) , in a few new areas:

• Meta-posts related to self hosting this site, focused on security and maintenance without mental fatigue.
• Climate science, starting with the impacts of some lesser-discussed contributors
• Thoughts on the spaces we build in different places, how they came to be and what they may become.
• Waste - what we do with stuff, and what we could be doing differently with it
• Creating digital tools from the perspective of someone decently bright but solidly outside of software developer circles.