We’re back in that glorious post-Christmas, pre-New-Year’s liminal period when the days blur together and I’m allowed to spend inordinate amounts of time tinkering on side projects and laying on the couch eating handfuls of Twiglets.
For the last couple weeks I’ve been plodding through an overdue and much needed migration of this website from Next.js to Astro . No shade on Next, but it wasn’t the right framework for the job; I found myself constantly battling server-side rendering errors and trying to escape hatch out of React. Astro lets me return to writing plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, rather than being trapped in a single front-end framework. It also takes a lighter approach to JavaScript, only including it when needed, and is designed for content-heavy websites like this one. If you’re reading this, the migration is complete! It took a good month but I’m much happier working in the new codebase.
The past six months have been a bit of a rush. At the end of July I got married, promptly learned we were pregnant, and started a new job two weeks later, right when debilitating “morning sickness” began to kick in. Which needs to be renamed persistent-all-day-every-day sickness. While the timing wasn’t ideal, I’m obviously thrilled about all of it. Living life on warp speed over here.
Luckily the company I joined was very understanding! Normally is a small design and research agency focused on the practical and thoughtful application of AI. They’re based here in London and I’m now a Lead Design Engineer there. This primarily means designing and building early-stage prototypes for our clients – either completely novel products or developing new services and features for existing systems.
Currently reading a sobering but beautifully written history of the Sackler family, Purdue Pharma, and the OxyContin opiod crisis called Empire of Pain . I’m usually not very good with horror, thrillers, or anything involving too much human peril and suffering. But Radden Keefe is a brilliant writer and his detailed historical narratives make it worth my discomfort.
