First!
2025-0405 Auckland, New Zealand.
Welcome to the site! One day I hope to have filled it with articles to share my knowledge, and ramblings and ventings to ease my soul. But for today this is simply the first article, so I think it's best to talk about why we're here.
If you use the web for any length of time you experience enshittificaition at its worst. I figure I should try to create the experience I want to have. Sites should mostly work without JavaScript at all. They should load extremely fast.
There's perhaps a sense of hubris here, too. Thinking that I can make a better site than people who do it professionally. It remains to be seen.
This site is also a place for me to exercise and refine my own aesthetic tastes. But I also have very little experience with front-end Web development. So have fun trying to spot which aspects are skill issues and which aspects are my own bizarre tastes. At the same time I want the site to be extremely fast, easy to navigate, and easy to read; very much intentionally in the spirit of a motherfucking website and all its friends.
Perhaps this site is my attempt to escape to a simpler time and space.
A brief tech tour:
- - Go's
net/httpHTTP server. - - Tailwind CSS for styling.
- - Solarized Dark for colours.
- - PrismJS for code highlighting.
- - HTMX for frontend interactivity.
Building the site in Go has been quite fun so far. In particular I have found http.HandlerFunc to be a rather nice interface, and I like the way things are quite easy to compose.
Mat Ryer's observations on Go HTTP services I found rather insightful.
I think Tailwind CSS might have been a bad idea for me since Tailwind really feels like "a faster way to type CSS"... this would be perfect if I had a good knowledge of CSS in the first place! Instead, I found myself getting stuck sometimes; not even sure what to search the documentation for.
Edit 2026-0106: With LLMs and coding agents, this is less of an issue.
Solarized Dark I chose mainly just to make a decision. Colour can be extremely complicated so I tried to simplify things for myself by choosing a palette that we already know is harmonious. In future I may make something more unique but for right now I am enjoying the look.