About me

I'm old enough to remember life before the internet.

I've been building websites, in one form or another, since around 2004. At first, it was just for fun on sites like angelist, and customizing my blog layout on Livejournal. Then, I started learning Wordpress for freelance work during my first job as a Graphic Designer.

From there, my professional life turned to front-end development, and then UX Design. But, websites started to lose their magic. Everything became the same. My job became about re-implementing the same patterns over and over. Tried and true, these patterns were meant to make a website as easy and as frictionless to use as possible, while guilding a "user" towards a business-goal.

Of course, that's helpful for sites where things need to get done. But social media lost all its personality. Your ability to customize and really make your profile feel like *.~ y o u ~.* Gradually, it became all about how to keep you engaged as long as possible, by hyjacking your strongest emotions of love, sadness, and hatred. Founding social media engineers left and exposed the truth of their product: it was DESIGNED by professionals to be addictive. Us "users" weren't aware of the slow-boil. My brain became mushy. Time slipped away. Where did the years go?

Now, I'm getting back to my roots - the fun I had trying to build things with code. Little snippets, little collections. Places of fun and displays of love, where you find things in common, and not things to divide. Where you can remember again, and feel safer that you aren't being manipulated to give your time at the altar of engagement.

I discovered neocities, and it re-engaged a portion of my memory that was dormant.

So, I hope you stay as long or a shortly as you'd like here!