see you at home, the band I’m in, is releasing their first single in several years this friday (2nd july), and it’s going to be a lot of fun to finally have this song we’ve been working on for a long time out there in the wild.

it’s made me also think about my relationships with creating music as a whole, as well as my relationship with writing code - and how they scratch similar itches.

it’s easy to think of writing code as a “non-creative” task, but as spending five minutes on stackoverflow will tell you, there are plenty of (hypothetical) “right” and “wrong” ways to write more or less any code. there are parallels to this with music, to an extent - in that there are general “rules” for how things are meant to be done (both in the form of genres, and general gatekeep-ery from fans and other musicians).

on a personal level, both of these tasks require you to work creatively within the confines of what you’re working on - and for me, it’s great! it allows me to get into the sought after “flow state”, where I’m happy to lose endless hours in pursuit of an end result.

yes, I’ve redesigned my personal homepage once more.

but this time, I’m changing the core philosophy — to something that I think better represents how I’m feeling about the current state of the internet, and society in general.

given that I write php for a living (I know), I’m very aware that it’s easy to make things sluggish and resource-intensive without even really thinking about it. things like fast server-side rendering and built in portability are things I’ve always been aware of, and have definitely taken for granted.

coming to this realisation happened around the same time as I discovered Sijmen J. Mulder’s list of text-only websites, a great resource that aggregates websites that are made up (almost) entirely of text.

I loved the idea! I’d long thought that monolithic, break-if-you-disable-js SPAs were often rolled out by default, with no real thought to whether or not they might be better served with just plain ol’ HTML and CSS. (also I discovered that the homepage of one of my favourite American funk outfits Vulfpeck was on Mulder’s list, which if you’re to take a look, quite clearly influenced my design…)

so, I’ve adopted that philosophy for my new personal site. I’ve got a new domain, a new homepage collating all my projects, pieces of writing, and contact details, and something design-wise that I believe will stand the test of time.

I assume you’ve seen it because you made it to this page, but if you haven’t, go ahead and check out the new homepage (back link in the top left), and I hope to be posting a lot more on here in the months to come.

thanks for reading,

charlie.