My Diary

January 5, 2025

I greet the universe today! a pure-blue planet with a ring around it

This diary that looks like an actual diary is a bit of an experiment. It's just a prototype right now, but I think I'd like to share the format so others can have their own webpage diaries, too! That's getting ahead of myself, though. Or maybe it's just straight to the point...

The Web can be a medium of free expression, and I want to share that with others. It can be fun and creative and authentic, it can respect the amount of time & attention you have, and all parts of it don't have to descend into an adware sellout culture. I want to share the means to pursue a more human vision of the Web with others, and I want to do it full-time.

I will likely quit my 4-year job with Infosys soon. I learned that I've been paid much less than my real worth for the work I've done. The people there have treated me well enough, but I'm already looking at what comes after. And that doesn't just mean higher-paying jobs. The way I see it, I have three options for how I'll make ends meet without throwing everything away:

  • Make & foster my own creations that'll support me financially. Low financial certainty, high freedom. I'd prefer this, and it has potential for me to focus my energy on something that makes the world a little better. Meaningful work.
  • Freelance project commissions. Below average financial certainty, above average freedom. I may do this if my own projects aren't panning out. Potentially stimulating & diverse.
  • Another job. Financially certain, not very freeing. If the above aren't working or if I need to pay into something important, I'll put my plans on hold & sell my time to pay for what matters. Good pay.

In any case, it's best that I continue working on things beyond any employment. All these options benefit from expanded & up-to-date software skills. I've been working on this site for the better part of the last week now, so it's what's going on in my life. I plan on making subdomains that use different technology stacks, too, so it'll expand my horizons when it comes to creating & learning more. Practicing the discipline to work full-time without being told to... that's one of the big steps to getting where I want to go.
A giant leap toward a great journey! launching space shuttle

January 6, 2025

It's the new year! fireworks

I don't really have a New Year's resolution, but ramping up my work here feels like the kind of change that can count as one! it's partly just a coincidence that I start now, and I say "partly" because the turn of the new year is exactly when I was offboarded from the enterprise project I was working on for Truist under Infosys. I didn't do anything wrong, they just cut funding from the whole project and let everyone go, effective January 1st. Things were uncertain for a lot of my teammates, but I at least have some sort of plan. Albeit, lots of people wouldn't want to try what I'm trying, to start working on my own Web projects and shoot for the moon.

I've honestly wanted to make this sort of change for a long time now, and it's a lot of my desires all coming together. It took its rough shape when I created my first Neocities website, but that's only a piece of where this plan comes from. I grew up not wanting to care what people think and had to compromise on that when the opinions of people in the professional world determined if I could put food on the table. I had to make the regular taken-for-granted compromises of what I could work on, when I could work, how much I could get compensated, who has control, how I dress, just a lot of things that are normal if you want to be employed. That's just how it is, and you deal with it.

However. If you work harder, it doesn't mean you get paid more. If you're a better worker, they just give you more work. And I've learned that I work particularly hard. The owner benefits, and that doesn't necessarily mean you do. This isn't a knock on capitalism; I do think it's valuable to be able to make tradeoffs to offload the otherwise complicated problem of justifying the benefits you take from society. Rather, it's to ask: what would it take for me to become an owner and benefit from my work?

Well, I need to be willing to work without being told. I feel this already filters out many of us, including my past self. I need a vision for creating something that might make people's lives a little better. I need several hard and soft skills: to be able to make complicated decisions, think on my feet, live below my means, deal with mistakes, communicate effectively, stick to my commitments... so many little things I at least partly have my employment to thank for. And I think that now, at the start of 2025, I'm finally ready :)

January 7, 2025

I added a cool little visual effect to the homepage!

I call it "Virtual Particles," and it's inspired by the real-life(ish) virtual particles used in physics to model force interactions using particles as force carriers! I've done my fair share of physics-ing by now, but it's still a darling subject for me. The visual effect has little to do with actual virtual particles, though; it's just what I imagine some of them might look a bit like if you could see them. They suddenly & quietly pop into existence, they say "hey, can't stop for tea," they travel a short distance, then they disappear just as suddenly as they appeared.

It's really just a visual effect meant to look cool, and it didn't take that long to make, either! That makes me surprised that I hardly ever see anyone else do anything quite like it, even on the wild & creative side of the Web. Big business would never have me work on something so frivolous, but I think that it makes the homepage look more alive. It's Alive Internet Theory!

January 8, 2025

Because of the way I make this site as a sort of art & experimentation project, it makes it subject to a type of writer's block. How should the next page look & interact? Should I use a page I already made as the template for the next one?

I'm looking at making another journal entry, and I don't think I want it to operate the way this diary does. The experience of a book-like page is cool and all, but compared to a more standard single-column continuous webpage, the small-book format is inconvenient if you want to convey information that would be useful to have others read. This diary is more of a personal tool, for me to write down & solidify some of my thoughts, plans, ideas, or what have you. It's not necessarily meant to reach any audience of readers.

But if I'm making a journal volume to better document my creation of this site or other projects, or to showcase others' works, or to show how to do something from my own experience, that could be useful to share with people. And it's just more easily engaged with in a more standard familiar non-page-turney format. Without any intrusive ads. So many informational pages let themselves be worsened by ads. skull

January 10th, 2025

New Year's strikes back balloon floating upward

In the USA, there's currently fire to the west and ice to the east. Wildfires and snowstorms. For all the tragedy that follows, the very concept of it is evocative. Many a creator and thinker must be pondering right now. It's a time of change for a lot of people, willing or not.

I read some people's New Year's resolutions yesterday, and it got me thinking of some of my goals. My most impressive projects right now are under a pseudonym, but I don't want to publicly associate these projects with my real name. These other projects wouldn't be stains on my professional presentation or indicative of a direction that I don't want to follow. Instead, I think of the potential futures of having one project or another under this name or that one or both, and I prefer the futures where these names are separated, at least for a while.

I want to be able to work on eclectic passion projects that I might not complete, without the pressure of professional scrutiny. I also want to be able to work on more professionally inclined projects without associating them with my most precious fun & creative endeavors. I have a right to be at least a little bit concerned about my own privacy and the privacy of people I've associated with under a username, and I don't want real-life professional associates to be able to exercise power over communities or projects that I might create under this other persona. Plus, associating these two names is an irreversible process.

It's not like that's unheard of in this space, either. I've had the UI component library ShadCN/UI on my radar for a bit, and while the developer of the library might have their real government name floating out there somewhere, they haven't made its association with the "shadcn" name obvious in any way. I can't speak on their motivations for this, but if I was to do this, it would be because I prefer that my creations come first and that personal real-life recognition for it is an afterthought, if even thought of at all. It makes the idea of using all of my personal creations as resume builders taste bitter on my tongue. Blegh!

I do still want to get up to speed on a bunch of Web technologies and don't want a huge gap in my resume if the time ever comes that I have to look for employers again, so I'll continue to add things here. Just, my very favorite projects are probably going to be elsewhere.

January 11th, 2025

My sleep schedule is doing a flip! an early 2000s cell phone doing a backflip

Last "night," I went to sleep at 11 in the morning. I spent most of the night re-tracing & documenting everything I did to put this website online, just so I could complete my first development log. Like I say at the end of that document, I'm hoping that having done that saves me the stress of figuring it out again in the future. Making that document was the most stress I've put on myself for the entire development of the site, though a lot of that is because I was dead tired by the end of it. Everyone I've worked with knows I work hard, but this time, I did it my way. And unlike the Frank Sinatra song, this feels less like an ending and more like a beginning.

So what's next? Thus far, a lot of what I've put on this site has just been logistical stuff with my own little coat of paint on it. I think of the home page as an atrium, which is part of what inspires its look, with the lights from above but something clean & airy within. True to an atrium, it has doors to all the other places. The WIP page helps me keep track of things I want to work on next, the Resume page is a layer of personal financial security for me in case I need to go back to that lifestyle, and the Journal page is a context where I can couch things that I want to have written down somewhere.

I think the next thing I make for ths site will be a sort of context, too. I've been eying up this online textbook on JavaScript, and having pages where I noodle out the concepts from the textbook could be nicer than just writing some scripts and leaving them in folders that no one ever looks at again. And I may make a links page sooner rather than later, just to start it off with links to resources like this.

January 12th, 2025

The Professional Development index page I made today might be the first actual webpage I've ever seen present its style as Frutiger Metro. I figured it might work as something "professional" looking without having to resort to standard corporate Web design.

Standard Web design like that can be great for maintainability and having multiple teammates understand it quickly to work on it continuousy. However, on a one-person site like this that serves as a creative & exploratory endeavor, practices like that would constrain my exploration of the core technology.

So now, I have a Professional Development index. I was driven to do it by wanting a page to track my continued self-education & skills development and trying to figure out where that page should go. Well, now it'll go on one of the petals on the Professional Development page, right alongside the Resume. Then, when I make the subpage tracking my self-education and link it on the Professional Development index, I can have a proper place to record my work from the JavaScript textbook I mentioned in yesterday's diary entry. Having skimmed the book now, I'm not sure it'll be the most useful for me at my level, but it's encouraged me to build pages to support my wider goals! Though, I think I'd also like to track my progress in other pursuits, like fitness, cooking, and music production. I'll probably just put those elsewhere, maybe link a "hobbies" page on my self-education / skills pages.

I looked up "the color of knowledge" to get an idea of a color I might want to build around for a self-education page, and the search results had a consensus on blue or navy. But beyond that, black (the color of my resume page & this diary) was identified as a "career" or "life path" color, while white & gray (the color of my homepage) are associated with "creativity," "helpfulness," and "heaven" in feng shui. I've previously made all these same associations with the pages on this site that have the corresponding colors, and that was completely unintended!

Aside from all that, I think my sleep is going back to normal now. Instead of falling asleep at 11 AM, 11 AM is when I woke up this morning! And now, I'm feeling sleepy before even getting to 10 PM. I thought I'd be on gremlin time for at least a few more days, but my body just wants to self-correct. Not that I'm complaining. Hopefully, it means I can get a normal night's rest. a sleeping smiley emote

Tomorrow!

Tomorrow!

I love ya,

Tomorrow!

You're only

a day awaaaay~

a lovely black cat
<^ Journal