Welp!
The aim of the next stretch of X time here is to reclaim looseness and learning! A good digital garden is not meant to be overly performative, and the clean break gave me some space to unteather myself from a mental model of rigidity and expectation.
So, proceeding is a new contract for a new chapter:
This isn't YouTube or Twitter, but a quiet assumption of deadlines and routines arose as I got going. (Largely self imposed, of course.) Given this is a personal website — I'm giving myself permission to let things surface when ready. It's time to loosen the deadlines.
Part of that pull was wanting to share as much as possible. As I'm compacting a few practices, that meant that there was only the stage, but no practice room. So, again — sharing when ready, not out of compulsion. What surfaces here should only be a fraction of what I'm working on, so I can stay loose off-stage, as it were.
For the best bits, I've surfaced two new pages for art and instrumental playing: Gallery and Studio. The aim is to let most of my blog posts be about progress primarily and allow for a looser approach to that side of things. This is a big relief for me. Sharing music and art was meant to be primarily about documenting my learning process. That got complicated once I got kind of good and had less room to share experimentation or glimpeses into what I'm actively learning!
And what about tech blogging??
It's a wild time to be working in tech, needless to say. Transparently, there's been so much change in how we work, it's been challenging to consider what's still worth writing about. I've been stuck! What to write if knowledge is cheaply available synthetically at the snap of your fingers?
It's only as I'm writing this now that I'm realizing what many have already said outside of tech — humanity is a premium resource. As good as these models are at certain tasks, it still takes incredibly thorough review and careful wielding. Judgement and learning can't come from a source that, even at it's most sophisticated, is prone to hallucination and whose "reasoning" is statistical. I'm still clicking through to find the human perspective behind it.
Besides, this is ultimately a personal site, not API docs. So same ethos as music and art, then — I'll share the learning process.
Sharing online is a tricky tightrope. Especially when sharing the journey of learning! The stage is something I've written about multiple times here, and the benefits are phenomenal for personal practices of all shapes and sizes. I continue to appreciate those that are generous enough to keep their garage doors open online, so I'll pick back up doing the same!