Everyone Wants A Blog, Nobody Wants To Blog
It's been more than a decade since I wrote a blog post on this site.
I told one of my new coworkers about my desire to restart my blog, and he hit me with the quote featured in this blog entry's title:
Everyone wants a blog, nobody wants to blog.
I have recently been inspired to get back to blogging for several reasons, including a desire to share technical discoveries that I've made, and also partially because of sentiment like that of Simon Willison's:
In the spirit of putting in the work to blog, I'll start by looking at what has changed since the last time I updated this site, starting by looking at what my about page used to say.
My name is Steven Merrill. I'm a classical singer and technologist based in New York, NY.
My name is still the same. I'm in Greater Boston now, and I haven't really been too involved with music, much to my chagrin.
This site is my personal blog. My initial post lays out this site's scope and also the etymology of the name, in case you're interested.
This site has changed names several times; it used to live at grenadesandwich.com, named after a plot twist in a TV series I was watching at the time. This blog also previously ran on Drupal, and then after than on Jekyll and later Octopress. Now it's a different flavor of static site, currently powered by the Eleventy.js static-site generator.
You can find my work a number of other places on the web:
- I write technical articles on Phase2's blog. I re-post selected articles back on this blog.
When I last blogged, I was working at Phase2. Following Phase2, I went to work at Formlabs, where I worked on the web and systems team and set up their first autoscaling infrastructure and their container deployment infrastructure as well as contributing to their e-commerce platform. After that I went to work at Litesport where I did web development for our e-commerce platforms and data platforms while also doing our infrastructure automation, backend API development, and a bit of video, mobile dev, and other work supporting various parts of the business.
I currently work at Campfire Learning where I've been developing maching learning solutions in addition to doing full-stack development.
- Brian McMurray and I wrote web development articles (often about Drupal, Flash, and the mobile web) at cascadingStyle.
Brian and I are still good friends (and have worked together at a number of places) but don't maintain a joint blog any more.
- I put up a personal portfolio in mid-2008, but it hasn't been updated recently.
- My singing portfolio was a great proof-of-concept of a Drupal-driven Flash site with full Google-indexable content underneath, but has similarly been somewhat neglected.
These sites are long gone.
- I microblog on Twitter as stevenmerrill.
Honestly, I try not to put much signal into Twitter these days, but I am back on and reading several curated tech lists, like my machine learning list and my Javascript list.
I try to put any new content onto my swm@hachyderm.io Mastodon account. I'd also recommend phanpy.social as a nice TweetDeck-ish view.
- Many of my open source contributions can be found on my 'smerrill' GitHub account.
This is still true, but my open-source contribution volume has definitely dropped off a bit. (Although I recently helped to do some pre-release testing of SentenceTransformers v3 and I am generally bullish on open-source machine learning tools.)
Thanks for stopping by!
I still echo this sentiment. Thanks for reading!