The Creativity Returns
onOctober 23rd, 2024
For a little over two weeks I have found myself with a whole lot of time on my hands. There have been no meetings. No messages asking about the status of various projects. No deadlines. Nothing. It has been an incredibly quiet period allowing me to unwind for the first time in months. During this time I've watched a lot of baseball, brought Ayumi to parks in six different prefectures, driven almost 3,000km, and attended several job interviews. However, what has surprised me the most during this time has been a resurgence of creative energy.
For the better part of a year I have been seriously considering leaving the world of tech as a personal form of protest against the disappointing ways humanity uses its power. When I started writing software in 1994 the future was so bright and limitless that I foolishly assumed that humanity would overcome so many of the challenges that has held it back with regards to education, information, communication, and productivity. However, the old adage times change but people do not has proven itself again and again. We use good things as weapons against each other, and corporate software is just as much a force for punishment as it is a tool for efficiency. As such, my desire to invest thinking power into solving problems that needn't exist in the first place has dwindled to the point where I didn't see any point to writing code, working with databases, or analysing problems; arguably the only things I'm mildly capable of on this planet.
That has changed over the past week or so, though, as I get my hands into the code that powers 10Centuries. The current platform was released six years ago. While there have been four attempts to get back into its development over the years, none have gotten out of the data design stage. I would bury myself in the minutia of database table design, API development, format compatibility, and the like. But nothing ever came out of it. The current version of the 10C platform is terribly out of date for how I currently write code, but at least it still works. Heck, one of the things I'm most grateful for is how low-maintenance the current version of the software is. I've been able to focus on so many other things.
But this is just as much a curse as it has been a blessing. Looking at my old code, I can see so many loose ends where I had planned on going back to refine and finish functionality. It's an embarrassing assemblage of half-finished ideas.
So to see that a new blogging theme has been completely written from scratch, along with some refinements to the underlying API, is encouraging. This new theme is designed to optimise reading of long-form posts in a left-to-right fashion. Rather than present a long page of text, the new layout will go very wide with as many columns as necessary. This is a design I've wanted to have for years, but could never set aside the time to figure out how to make it work ... until recently.
Other nice features include the ability to set a dark theme, change the font, as well as the size of the text. These preferences are stored in the browser, so readers who regularly visit a site using this theme will not need to re-apply their changes ... unless they're using the private browsing mode or clear their browser cache, of course. The contact form has been updated so that it properly works1, and the archives page is close to being what I want to see. As always, there's more to be done.
Work has also started on an updated layout for Nice.Social, which has been using the half-baked Murasaki theme for the last four years. The plan for this newer layout is to give people more personal preference options as well as a single place to manage all of their account settings. And, when not working on that, there is also a new administration page that is being built which will give people an overview of all their sites, their account, their personas, and anything they may need to customise 10C the way it was originally intended way back in v22.
All in all, this return of creativity has been a wonderful thing. I find myself asking more questions, seeking more information, and building more things every day. When Ayumi and I are out driving, I use the time to seek inspiration. With any luck, this positive energy will continue and lead to some interesting outcomes.
Thanks for reminding me about this, Jeff.
10Cv2 had a lot of customisation and 3rd-party integrations. It was not coded very well, but it was flexible and dependable as heck.