Two years. The blog went dark, and nobody really noticed — which is fine, because it was never for the audience. It was for me.
Here’s what happened: life got busy in the way that life does. The day job expanded. Projects piled up. The blog started feeling like one more thing that needed maintenance, and so it quietly stopped being maintained. The domain renewed itself once, twice, and mostly just sat there redirecting to nothing.
The bench never stopped, though. The builds kept happening — just without the write-ups.
What brings me back
Honestly? AI.
Not in the “AI will change everything” way that people keep saying. More in the practical sense: I’ve started using it as a thinking partner. When I’m working through a design problem at midnight and there’s nobody to bounce ideas off, having something that can engage with a half-formed thought is genuinely useful.
This blog itself — the new version you’re reading now — was built in a session that involved a lot of back and forth with Claude. Not “write my blog post” prompting. More like: here’s what I want, here’s the constraint, here’s what I don’t want — and then iterating on what comes back. It’s a different kind of working. I’m still doing the thinking, but the gap between “I have an idea” and “I have a thing” got a lot shorter.
I find that interesting enough to write about.
What this blog is
Personal. That’s the main thing.
I run a CAD design team in my day job. We work on large-scale commercial flooring projects — the kind where precision matters and the floor plans are bigger than most people’s apartments. That work is good and I take it seriously. But this isn’t about that.
This is the other half. The part that runs on curiosity and insomnia.
Right now the bench has a Tang Nano 9K that I’m trying to coax into outputting a usable VGA signal. There’s an ESP32-S3 that’s been waiting three weeks to become an air quality monitor. Somewhere in the corner there’s a box of vintage hardware that I keep meaning to do something useful with and instead just open occasionally to look at.
I’ll write about those things. About what worked and what didn’t. About the datasheet I misread and the three hours I lost because of it. About the moment something works for the first time and the strange quiet satisfaction of that.
On schedules
None. I’ve tried having one and it turned the writing into a job. This isn’t a job.
Posts will appear when there’s something to say. Sometimes that’s weekly. Sometimes it’s once a month. The RSS feed exists for a reason.
If you’re the kind of person who’s also awake at 2am with a soldering iron and a half-working schematic, you’ll probably enjoy it here.
Good to be back.