Do you have a personal website? If so, are you paid to develop software? I know this won't be academically robust, but I'm curious about the number of people who have a personal website and are not themselves professional or semi-professional software developers, compared to the number of those who are.
For purposes of this poll, "professional developer" means have been paid to make software. Boost if this is interesting to you too!
New year, new blog, new RSS feed!
Over my holiday break I played a solo TTRPG for the first time. This is how it went.
https://blakewatson.com/journal/i-tried-solo-rpg-with-ironsworn-starforged/
Sometimes you need graph paper, whether it’s for a digital background or to print out and draw on. Rather than scouring the internet and settling for something subpar, this neat little home-cooked app from @davatron5000 lets you generate a variety of different types of graph paper.
https://grid-paper.daverupert.com
Superwhisper has been my speech-to-text daily driver for over a year now. But I'm constantly seeing other neat ones. This one in particular is cool because it is open source and free to download. https://handy.computer/
Anybody have a go-to (heh) resource for learning Go? I'm mostly considering it for web backend projects.
Every Risk player knows if you want to protect North America you don't stop at Greenland. You grab Iceland too so that whoever has Europe doesn't get their continental bonus. /s
Health care in America is obviously very screwed up. That said, there are resources out there available for people, but it's hard getting the word out about them.
For instance, people with a disability have access to a special savings account called an ABLE account. If you or someone you know is losing benefits because they have too much money in savings, this account is their way out of that problem.
https://www.ablenrc.org/what-is-able/what-are-able-accounts/
I say this as someone who really enjoys writing JavaScript.
https://social.lol/@bw/115901138426144070
No problem exists in this world that can’t be exacerbated by JavaScript.
I've been getting into a solo TTRPG called Ironsworn: Starforged. I have a goal of doing more creative writing this year. I wanted it to be at a slower pace than the normal, tight-deadline, NaNoWriMo-style writing that I often attempt.
I don't usually publish my creative writing, but I decided to publish my playthrough of this game as a website, partly for funsies but also to keep me motivated. This isn't great fiction, mind you. It's a game, so the pacing is a bit different than a normal story.
If anyone would know, it would be Fedi peeps!
https://howse.social/@tj/115867891583374473
I’m a happy Obsidian user but Trilium Notes looks pretty cool, especially if you want a personal wiki or prefer a rich text experience over Markdown. https://triliumnotes.org/
Bought vitamin D
Received human hair instead
Close, but no cigar
Happy Insurrection Day to all who celebrate.
Sometimes I find interesting things on the internet and I DM them to friends or coworkers. I decided that I needed to put them on my website instead, so I added link post functionality to my blog (and feed)!
Wishing all my Fediverse peeps a happy new year. https://blakewatson.com/journal/2025-my-year-in-review/
I've been using this icon for over a year and honestly I need Momo icons for all my apps now.
https://socel.net/@heyheymomo/115690508085071064
When it comes to website backends for personal projects, I try to use just enough to get the job done. That's historically been PHP and Fat-Free Framework. But now I'm giving Flight PHP a spin.
I've also used Express/ Node and Cloudflare Workers/Hono.
I'm lazy and I don't want a maintenance burden. So I find that PHP is nice most of the time, as it can run pretty much anywhere super easily.
My D&D character's current XP is 23,456. 😌