I got a fun email earlier today - a support request for literally the second piece of software I ever wrote, back in 2001 when I was a kid with a couple months of programming under my belt.
It's a click tracker that I called Click Manager. Pretty simple stuff - a Perl CGI script that counts how many times a link was clicked, storing the data in a flat file database.
Eventually I even added a nifty UI to view the stats. Check it out, in all its early 2000s glory:
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I made another mini project for no apparent reason. You can load one or many CSV files into a SQL database within your web browser (client side) and run SQL queries on them. In most situations it's not that useful (most databases already support importing CSVs without too much trouble), but it might save somebody some time in a pinch. And it's cool that things like this are even possible, purely client side.
Code is on GitHub.
God damn, I've been neglecting this blog. It's sad really, because I do have a lot to say. I guess I've just been talking to myself instead of blogging lately, which maybe says something about my mental stability, but whatever. I'm blogging now, and I'm going to blog the fuck out of this blog.
It's 2016. My job is pretty cool in some ways, but in some other ways it bothers me a great deal. It's probably not in my best interest to go into that in great detail here (as if anyone is reading this, right?) so I will leave the rest unsaid, and just get to the broader point. I am someone who cares a great deal about science, engineering, creating cool things, doing things the right way, etc. And when I say "cares a great deal" I mean probably more than I can adequately articulate with my pedestrian writing skills. It's almost like a spiritual thing. So for someone like me, what do you do when your day job is preventing you from attaining your desired level of spiritual satisfaction?
Side projects!
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My blog is powered by WordPress. WordPress remains at its core a monstrous amalgamation of PHP spaghetti code. Thus, despite the fact that WordPress is free (beer+speech), easy to use, well supported, well documented, and all that jazz... it still pains my hacker sensibilities to use it. For similar reasons, a lot of hacker types are moving away from WordPress and similar blog software to static site generators like jekyll.
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