Principles

These principles aren’t meant as hard rules. They are a way of describing my approach for this site and a way for you to better understand my perspective behind the decisions I’ve made for this site.

I have used Tracy Durnell’s Guiding Principles for my website as a jumping-off point for my own principles.

Be Open (and Closed)

Share where it may be of value to others. I share my perspective in hopes of enriching others. I learn from others—perhaps others can learn from me. That doesn’t mean every detail gets shared—especially of my personal life; I desire to protect the people I care about. While I may talk of my friends and family, it’s generally done in vague terms.

Be Kind

I write about what I want to write about and how I want to write about it. I try to be kind, even when being critical. I might be wrong about something. I have biases. I am human. I am imperfect. My writing might be informal but I rarely cuss. I don’t use emojis. Historically, it was because encoding was a hassle. Now, it’s because emojis render differently and may give a different meaning than intended depending on the platform or even depending on what generation you’re from. (Thumbs up emoji gang here.)

Be Connective

They say that no man is an island and while this site is written and maintained by me, it is also about connection. That connection occurs primarily through linking to others (with no expectation of them linking back to me). Hyperlinks act as connective tissue, allowing perspectives to be built on each other and knowledge to be shared.

I invite conversation but—for now—I’ve chosen not to have those conversations on my site. Maintaining comments had turned into a hassle with most of them being spam. Each article has an email link—on the post and in RSS—to encourage personalized discussion.

Be Playful

This site has always been a playground for myself—from way back in the day playing with fixed positioning to researching the ins and outs of various CSS properties to learning about different technology. It has always been fun to explore various topics and see what I can pull off technically and then to share what I’ve learned with others.

Be Authentic

Reach isn’t important for me. There’s no analytics. There’s no tracking. I’m not trying to drive a bunch of traffic to the site and posting it on Slashdot or Hacker News or Reddit or whatever. There no posting schedule, optimizing for when people are most likely to read and share. Posting is random and it can be consumed at will.

When you visit my site, I want you to feel like you’re getting me and not some marketing machine. As such, I respect your privacy.

Be Good

In a general sense, I’ve tried to do that and in that general sense, I believe I have succeeded.

From a political standpoint, I’ve been quiet and perhaps even a coward. It was easy to hide behind the idea that this is a tech blog and not a political one but as we’ve seen, tech is political. It’s difficult to use or talk about different platforms without acknowledging the ethical and non-ethical uses of those platforms.

I am progressive and believe in caring for people. I don’t have any party affiliations. I don’t believe political parties should be treated like a sports team. I believe in human rights and that includes everybody, regardless of gender or sex.

One of the reasons I’ve moved to publishing more of my content on my own sites is because I don’t want to associate with platforms that are money and power hungry, abusing algorithms and advertising. I also don’t want to abandon friends and lose connections because those platforms are the places where they choose to live.