So upon getting here you may be wondering general questions like “what is this”, and “why are they making me read this page” and “why is there suffering in this modern world, what with computers and all”? All excellent questions to be sure, and I figured I’d devote some space to answering them before getting to the process of writing down whatever comes to mind while completing my day-to-day tasks at my nerd job.

Oops, I’ve gone and given it away, haven’t I? Well, this is a site I’m using to keep track of various ideas that I’m working on at any given time, plus anything else that I feel needs expounding on. Don’t worry, I’ll keep the personal opinion stuff pretty mild. I’m really just tired of filling in a blank on all those “Personal blog” forms I’m constantly filling out.

As a bit of requisite backstory, I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area from New Jersey in 2007 to take a job with a nascent advertising megacorporation startup named Google, doing all kinds of developer outreach sort of stuff. Here I am in all my naïve glory (on the left):

So young, so full of hope...

The construction of the blog itself is a bit more interesting, to be honest. I decided to use Jekyll, mostly for reasons explained well here. What Ted doesn’t mention, though, is how Jekyll won’t let you do things like create per-tag or per-category pages, show post snippets, or any of the stuff that must be too esoteric to support. Thankfully, better people than me have fixed such issues, and I’m happy using jekyll_ext to construct this thing. If you’re really curious about how the sausage is made, then feel free to check out the source on github.

And in all honesty the markup and stuff here is pretty pathetic for someone who is supposed to know something at all about HTML, so I’ll be playing around with stuff as I go along. You can’t be a blogger without writing, though, and I was really tired of fucking around with the design of this thing while posts were going unwritten.

So I’m posting this, and I’ll be posting more until I get bored. Hope you like stuff that’s awesome!

Also, I should note that yes, I am currently an employee of Google, although the content of this blog is neither reviewed nor endorsed by my employer. The views expressed on these pages are mine alone.