Personal website of Blake Watson Online since 2005

Minimal color illustration of a white man with brown hair, headphones, and wearing a red shirt emblazoned with a ringed planet silhouette.

I’m a software engineer, side-project enthusiast, hobbyist game developer, sometimes writer, and full-time wheelchair user.

Journal

Things I got from specific people

You ever stop to think who inspired your favorite activity? Or who introduced you to your favorite songs? Who taught you things you still use years later?

2024: my year in review

Looking back on another year, fighting against the steady march of time.

Alpine.js for home-cooked apps

Alpine is my secret weapon for building interactive UIs with haste and abandon. Perfect for home-cooked apps that need to get done fast.

Journal archive →

Microblog

To be fair, they said we could still disco dance at the Grand Opening.*

* I don't know what they're opening, and they didn't say.

I got a legitimate-looking email from someone I’ve never heard of from an org I’ve never heard of that informed me that the disco party has been cancelled.

So that sucks.

I was helping @mhilltopple debug some JavaScript and had a complete brain fart where I thought you could check for the existence of a variable with an if statement.

But no. You can *assign* to a nonexistent variable (JavaScript just creates a global variable for you, as long as you’re not in strict mode). But you can't just reference any old made-up variable.

Microblog archive →