i found this on hn, its pretty neat

from my article series "IT Things We Pretend Are Fine"

Blue Hat, and the Joy of Being a N00b Again

that is the point

Sometimes a quote is better

In a follow-up to my dramatic, but well-thoughtout (at least I believe so) critique of ridiculously long commute times into places of work, here is my soapboat rant about what happens when you actually arrive in the office.

I pen this blog post because it is the start of 2026 and my year of 2025 was largely quite productive, but the office had absolutely nothing to do with that and was largely a hindrence to (first buzzword) deepwork.

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Since I am effectively blogging daily at the moment, allow me to indulge one of my more negative (and perhaps toxic) traits, the rant. But let me be clear, this rant comes from a place of sincere frustration and sadness. Not because of the commute itself, but because of the ever-present anxiety causes by the lack of reliability and faith in the UK’s public transit infrastructure.

That, and the ridiculously high cost of commuting.

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The blog’s alive or at least limping around with just enough posts to stand up on its own. I can post entries, they get sorted into categories, and everything lands where it should. But there’s more to do. There’s always more to do.

Things I’d still like to build:

-Some kind of comments system (thinking something minimal, not trying to rebuild Reddit) that integrated with the Fediverse.

• Category-level RSS feeds
• Referral tracking, mostly for curiosity
• Decent stats, my hosting provider has no stats system.
• Somewhere to stick longer pieces that don’t fit the “latest post” model
• Auto-link directory: pull links straight from posts and sort them somewhere useful

Categories don’t really show up properly since I’m using a random (although nice) theme for my blog that I found somewhere. I’d say that I would code my own theme at some point but lets be honest I don’t have the time for that.

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Getting this blog running was the easy part after just a few evenings sunk into GitHub Actions and a healthy refusal to use anything turnkey. Writing for it, though? That’s the harder bit.

I’ve been staring down this empty page longer than I care to admit, trying to unpick how I’m meant to sound here. Most of my past writing has lived in forums or in places that demand neutrality and a bit of polish. Neither of these voices quite fit with this blog, where the best writing tends to land somewhere between casual conversation and internal monologue where my point isn’t lost halfway through.

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It feels like a cop-out when you don’t want to actually publish any of the things you have in Drafts, and you’d be right. So here it is, the obligatory how I built my website post.

Frankly there isn’t much to tell, I spent the first ten years of my IT career playing around with WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and the others and the last CMS I truly deployed was Ghost which is the most impressive of all of them in my opinion.

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