Hey, welcome to my blog!
This is just a place for me to ramble on about stuff that I enjoy. You can find all sorts of things here. Tech, art… opinions (scary!). Oh, and go donate to the Free Software Foundation already!
Wow, this site is awful, it’s so empty!
Yes, you’re right. Where are the ~A N I M A T I O N S~, the bright colors, the images! This site even loaded in under a second for you, didn’t it? There’s no JavaScript to be seen here either when not necessary! No rounded corners? No transparency?? It’s readable and accessible? It’s not a single-page React + Vite + Tailwind + Bootstrap + Whatever other fad here? It isn’t delivered in 8mb of JavaScript?
Unbelievable, I know! You see, I’ve made this blog after being completely disillusioned with the state of the modern internet. Everything nowadays needs to be so… needlessly complicated. Layers upon layers of development abstraction that only exist to satiate the “design patterns” and “re-usability” hunger of higher ups. I promise, this site is free of any unnecessary abstractions. It runs on WordPress to allow me to not bother about manual HTML writing for simple posts, that’s about it. No needed plugins, a simple theme…
Of course, the tech is not the only thing that sucks now. There are plenty of other things, such as useless fluff and AI, everywhere in your search engines… My goal is simple: If you somehow found me through Google (please switch to a free-er alternative!), you should be able to read the content of my posts or guides or whatever without feeling like you’re skimming through fluff added there to pad length and aid SSO. To be honest, I’ve come to accept that the worse my SSO is, the better my content is.
But, I’m a web developer! Do you hate me?
Well, no, not really. Don’t get me wrong, I loathe what web designers and managers have turned the internet into. I miss IRC and simple personal pages. But I can’t hold web developers as people responsible. They simply had to do what their environment made them do. Commissioners and managers want useless 8mb of JS pages. They want a 9001th framework. They want yet another layer of abstraction on top of their already insanely abstracted stack.
Growing up is learning to appreciate simplicity. I’ve started getting into hardware development and ISA design. I cannot comprehend how we got to where we’re at. Did you know that even modern ARM CPUs have a hardware instruction that has the name “JavaScript” in them? What a world we live in. Something, something, a genius admires simplicity.
What can I do to bring back the web?
Decentralize your life! Host your own services! Avoid social media! You can do so, so much more than you think, I am sure. I complain about the tech because I am a software engineer myself. But you know what else I complain about? Censorship, surveillance and the normalization of slop (not just AI slop, human slop is just as bad). To be honest, if you simply gave yourself UBlock filers for any short-form content, ads, preferring simple websites and avoiding one of the five websites that everything is shared around would be a great first step.
Oh, and by the way, when I say “censorship”, do not believe that I am talking about le ebil wokies trying to steal your jobs and your freeze peaches or whatever. As a European, we are actively fighting against the death of E2E encryption, especially here in France. Don’t fall for their culture war. They’re distracting us from what matters. Though know that I personally consider you a worthless waste of air if you do fall for it. I’m openly queer, if that bothers you, go back to voting your rights away. Idiot.
Stay free, friends.