The Zen of Cheese Sandwiches and 90s Technology

There’s an old Tibetan koan (probably) that goes along the lines of “to make a cheese sandwich from scratch one must first invent the universe”. I’m not going to bother looking up if that’s true or not but you get the gist of what I’m saying here I think.

I’ve been making a new personal site for prospective employers and also because I’ve got a bit of spare time on my hands. The two facts are not mutually exclusive. With the zen cheese sandwich in mind I’ve been bootstrapping my way to a new website. I’m probably going to use an off-the-shelf CMS because there’s only so much my poor brain can handle at any one time and at the moment it’s all front-end technologies.

When I started I thought “I do the same thing every time I start a new project, I should build a boilerplate.” So I built a boilerplate so I can check it out of github and get on with work rather than spend precious minutes or hours or whatever on setting up.

“I really want to learn about PJAX (Pushstate with AJAX)” so I started writing a vanilla JS PJAX library.

“I can’t have an asynchronously loaded site without having some sort of YouTube/Github progress signifier” I told the cat as there’s nobody in the house for a week and my grip on reality is slipping somewhat. So I built a small CSS3 animation progress bar.

“My layout sucks, I should do it in Flex. But I hate using Flexbox.” So I built a simple flexgrid CSS tool.

I’m sure you can see what’s happening here. Cheese sandwich in hand I was building the universe.

That’s when things started getting weird. Well, weirder anyway. The base level of weird is quite high around here. Now that I could spin up a project in a matter of seconds things there’s no reason not to for any and all ideas I may have at any given time. This week alone I’ve started and pushed to a dozen brand new repositories. The nadir (or pinnacle perhaps dependent of viewpoint) of which might be my reintroduction to the web of the <blink> tag.

You’re welcome Internet (fuck you AP, I won’t do what you tell me). Next up I might have a stab at a marquee tag for the new millennium*. Once I get my website built of course.

* Marquee was never deprecated! Can you imagine my surprise when I tried to start this project and there was text dutifully marching from right to left as if the 90s had never left.