Containers, self-reliance vs. community, doing

Ah, it’s the “Hello, World!” post. Until recently I was employed working as a technical lead / engineering manager for a team working on VA.gov. I was there for nearly 5 years, and I was grateful for the opportunity to do paid work for something that I viewed as having purpose or being on some level for the public good. How that worked out is a story for another time. I have decided that it is time for a work break, and I am on my own for the moment, working on what I am interested in.

Part of what I want to do with this time is write. I used to write more. I kept a website that I updated occasionally, mostly lost to time, though I just realized I can review old versions of my little site via the Internet Archive (D-g bless them and please give them money). Like almost everybody, social media use has atrophied my writing muscles. It’s not worth feeling regret or remorse about this, but there’s also nothing to be done but to do.

Looking back, I can see a pattern: I set up some system for blogging, based on the trends of the day, I write a few posts, and then it sits unused. I never have developed a habit of writing on the regular. I do this with journals as well. There are any number of journal notebooks around my place, with a few entries and then a lot of blank pages. Sometimes a journal will be used over years, decades, and I’ll bounce from physical journal to journal. At some point I should digitize them and organize all the entries chronologically. I probably have more than I think, if I combine everything.

So, it’s my tradition to start a new website, blog or whatever, with a post laced with mild self-deprecation about how I have a tendency to build containers and not fill them. This round is no different. I’m starting with self-reflection about how certainly this time will be different /s. I’ve at least learned at this point that verbally committing to it is hubris. I will either do it or I won’t. There’s nothing to be done but to do. “Do or do not. There is no try,” a wise man once said.

Part of what you hear from creative self-help literature is to make it as easy as possible to do the actual creative work, since otherwise that’s friction that you need to overcome. And so, in and also against the spirit of that, I’ve spent the morning, some two hours now, trying to get a Hugo static-site framework site going. Hugo is not hard, as these things go, though I haven’t yet set up deployment. Most of my time has been spent fiddling with themes, trying out different ones, all with different states of documentation and with different aims. When I eventually realized I could just spin up a new blank theme, I went ahead and did that. It is ugly. Depending on when this is read, it may no longer be in the default style. But, I was wasting time, and I would prefer something minimally styled anyway, so, ugly it is for now.

I would like to self-host. I have had enough online things disappear through platform decay and neglect, or else because of my own desire to leave (Facebook, e.g.). Platforms do not generally have your best interests at heart; if you are not paying for it, you are the product, etc etc. It feels important to me to have as much control over this as I can exert, so that in theory I can keep it alive for as long as I want.

And yet. This is hosted through Github Pages. That’s a platform. I am typing this in VSCode, which is freely provided by Microsoft (which also owns Github, as it happens) (I initially typed “who also owns Github”; Microsoft is not a person and we should be careful with words). I don’t have control over the operating system I’m working on (MacOS as it turns out, for now) (yes I should be using some Linux variant if I care about this).

I’ve been thinking about how we cannot be free of reliance on other companies, systems, people, institutions. I followed the thought of how I could be completely self-reliant here, and I got as far as sharpening a stick and burning the sharp point over fire to make a crude pencil; and then I realized I can’t make paper. I also can’t make a knife. Nor tape, or a stapler, or even a simple hammer and nail, if I wanted to post this up anywhere publicly. I could scratch in the dirt with a stick and it would be entirely my own, except for the system of education that taught me to write, and the networks of distribution that allow me to eat.

You can really go too far, following this line of thinking and trying to be logically and ethically consistent. So, for the moment, I rely on open source software and platforms that exchange free access for my information and attention.

What is important is to write. This is already too long and I am already tired. Nearly every creative self-help work I’ve read tells you to show up daily and to keep it small (those are not affiliate links btw; we won’t be doing that). I’ve already violated the latter; I will see how I do with the former.