The first rule of blogging is that if you ever write about:
Recommitting to regular posting, or
How much easier your new blogging setup makes posting,
…you’re guaranteed to abandon your blog for months. At least, that’s always been my experience 🙃
The last (checks notes – holy $%^#!), year has absolutely flown by. I won’t give you the play-by-play, but it’s been a good/wild ride.
Looking forward, I genuinely love this time of year in Utah. Everything is reaching peak shades of green, and the weather has finally settled into reliable shorts-and-t-shirt territory. Even better, golf and mountain biking season is back, bringing fresh energy into my life after the offseason.1
Without making any promises, I hope when I’m writing another update in May 2026 that this upcoming year will be packed with at least half the fun and interesting experiences as this past year. If so the lack of blog posts will be worth it.
This past winter, I experimented with an indoor golf simulator membership, which turned out to be a perfect escape during the cold, snowy months (and it even helped shave a few strokes off my handicap). ↩︎
The simpler it is to write and publish content to your website, the more likely it is that you will. I don’t make the rules, that’s just human nature.
Most of the time I write on my MacBook, but there’s no technical reason preventing me from publishing from my iPad or iPhone, it just requires some setup the first time.
Today I picked up the new 13” iPad Pro and the matching Magic Keyboard, so I figured it was a great time to publish a little article from the new mobile setup with my first impressions of the new hardware and the apps I use to write on the go.
Louie Mantia has been on a roll lately in his prolific advocacy for making things on the Internet. He wrote a post a couple months ago titled Make a Damn Website and he followed it up today with the very practical How to Make a Damn Website.
We overcomplicate what a website needs to be, and it gets in the way of actually making it. So take his (and now my) advice, and make a damn website.
Sometimes I have thoughts along the lines of: “why am I blogging this if no one is reading it?” and on good mental days I’ll respond back1 with something to the effect of: “my writing is primarily for me, and if someone else sees it and appreciates it, that’s an added bonus of writing it down publicly.”
Today as I was contemplating a few different posts that are rolling around in my head, I had one of these thoughts pop into the foreground, stopping me in my tracks. As I was working through it, justifying the blogging process to myself once again, I decided that blogging is a bit like gardening2.
Tending to a garden is often a means to an end: you want to harvest the food you’re planting, or you want the plants and flowers to exist for the beauty they bring to the area. While those are valid reasons, gardening is also it’s own reward: you are carving out time and space to meditate and reflect, and over time it becomes a place that you made your own, the result of many different deliberate (and accidental) decisions.
If other people like the look of your garden, that’s great! However if you start ripping out plants that people don’t like, or adding in flowers that they said would look better, it would start to become a community garden, not your own. There’s nothing wrong with a community garden, and there’s nothing wrong with building consensus in a group, but there is also room in the world for your own space. Your own little corner of existence where you can pick, prune, and plant to your heart’s content.
That’s what blogging is to me. It’s a place where I can write my own thoughts, and revel in the process of editing, rewriting, and publishing my posts.
It’s my little garden on the Internet.
Yes, I have conversations with myself, doesn’t everyone? ↩︎
After I posted a link to this note on my Mastodon account, Kyle Hughes pointed out that I had stumbled upon the same terminology that many people have been using over the last few years, including this wonderful post by Maggie Appleton on her website. I have a lot more to think about now! ↩︎
This is MKBHD’s third video about the Vision Pro, and I agree with pretty much every point he makes. I think he does a good job of pointing out how most of the decisions that went into this device come with real tradeoffs, but in practice it’s still a really cool start for Apple’s foray into AR/VR/“spatial” and the tech on it’s own is still impressive.
Personally, I am very interested to see what visionOS 2.0 brings, as the timeline of this device’s announcement and subsequent release lines up with what happened with iOS v1 → v2. My [educated] guess is that most of what is on visionOS right now is quite close to what was running on the media demo devices at WWDC last June, and that most of the core visionOS development time has been spent on 2.0, not on polishing 1.0.
I’m sure there’s been a ton of polish work, and I’m sure some of the various app teams at Apple have been spending time porting their apps to visionOS, but new feature work on the core OS has likely been slated for v2 for quite some time.
WWDC ‘24 could bring a lot of cool quality of life things that make this version of the hardware even better.