I Miss Teaching
Reflecting on what I miss about teaching, both in the classroom and in the cockpit as a flight instructor.
Chris Wiegman
Tech leader, mentor, blogger, and open-source advocate with over 20 years of experience building humane, privacy-focused teams and technology.
Latest posts
Experimenting with AI: How I use it in 2026
I love writing code. I’ve always loved writing code. That said, writing code is no longer part of my day job. Today my job is to build my teams and help push our engineering org forward, a very different role that requires a different toolset. In 2026 part of that, whether I like it or not, has involved AI. To learn how to use AI I’ve also deployed it in some of my own work, but that…
Why Resetting my Music Library was the Right Move
Why I wiped a two-thousand-album music library this year and what I'm building in its place.
My Hugo Theme Continues to Evolve
A high-level look back at what's changed in my Hugo theme, Kana, since I moved this site back to Hugo late last year.
Why I Still Bother with RSS in 2026
Why I switched RSS readers again, and why RSS, not social media algorithms, is still the best way to keep up with the sites that actually matter to me in 2026.
Battling Link Rot on a Hugo Site
Using Lychee both locally and on GitHub to stay on top of link rot on a Hugo site.
You Don't Need the DuckDuckGo noai Subdomain
There’s a lot of hype about accessing DuckDuckGo via its “noai” subdomain. It works, but there’s a better way. Instead of using a special domain to access DuckDuckGo, a method that works, but not in every situation, you can just use the normal DuckDuckGo domain, without AI and customizable even further to serve your needs. Just look at the screenshot at the top of this…
Backing Up All My GitHub Code
A simple command line tool for backing up all your public and private GitHub repos.
A Digital Reset
Every once in a while, I reset my digital life. It’s a habit that goes back to 2010, when I first cleared my Twitter post history, and over time it has grown in scope. My latest reset was this past week. Why Cleaning Up Online Is Good For Me There are a lot of reasons I regularly clean up my digital life, but they can all be summed up in one sentence: what I put online, especially in places…
Basic Stats for This Site
After publishing on this site for the last two months I realized there is something I’m missing, basic stats. It might be vanity, but I really do find it useful to know which pages are actually getting traffic and what content people seem to care about. This isn’t the type of blog that many people will read regularly, most of the traffic has always been from searching for a topic from a single…
You Probably Don’t Need a Content Management System
You Probably don’t need a full content management system. Just six months ago I didn’t believe that myself and it caused me to make the mistake of moving this site back to WordPress . It’s true though. The thing is most sites aren’t really managing content at all, at least not at a scale that requires the complexity and issues that come with something like WordPress. What they need instead is a…
Travel for Work and Pleasure
Saturday night we returned home from our first vacation in almost 3 years. Our last trip, to Porto in 2023 , was more of a fact-finding trip in hopes that we could move abroad. Unfortunately life had a different idea and my mom passed away a few weeks after we got home, changing the trajectory of a lot of things for us. These days we’re pretty happy in Chicago and, thankfully, don’t…
Better Taxonomy Management for Hugo with VS Code
Learn how to maintain consistent Hugo categories and tags using VS Code snippets and autocomplete for better content organization.
Time To Move
I might be a bit quiet here for the next few weeks. We’re not moving house again, but I do get to leave the house for a bit. Next week I’ll be in Athens, Greece for our annual company all-hands. It’s a new country for me with a company I haven’t been at too long and I’m really looking forward to it. While I’ve only been at Fingerprint for about 5 months,…
On Writing and AI
For all the work I’ve done on improving my Hugo workflow, there’s one thing automation can’t do. Automation can’t write for me. I know, I know… AI is all the rage and I could find some agent to put out slop on this site, but that is precisely what I build this site to avoid. Writing is the fun part. A place for me to write is why this site exists. I don’t write for a “side hustle” or to…
One Month Back on Hugo - It Was the Right Move
Reflections on using Hugo, one month after I moved this site back to it from WordPress.
Preparing for Cleanup
In 2021 I decided to start posting on this site 3 days a week . For the most part that strategy has worked well. It’s been something I enjoy and I’ve created a lot of content in doing so. Some of my posts, however, have been anything but “quality.” When times were tough I would post anyway, rather than take a pause, just for the sake of posting. That content isn’t helpful to you or…
Automating Sustainable Draft Post Creation in Hugo
I’ve had a much better experience blogging with Hugo since coming back to the platform last month . Most of this is due to some automation I’ve added to help make drafting posts, and publishing those drafts, easier. Last week I talked about deploying this site to Cloudflare workers . Today I want to share how I create a draft. The Problem with Hugo Post Creation Usually you add new…
Harper, My New Grammar Checker
For years I’ve used the popular Code Spell Checker extension for VS Code . While it’s been great for spell checking, as I write more in VS Code, especially in using Hugo for this site, I’ve wanted something that could check for grammar issues as well. This isn’t a new feature, services like Grammarly have, of course, been around for over a decade and then there are the…
Winter is Here
We’ve passed the holidays which means “real” winter has arrived in Chicago. If there’s a time of year in Chicago that I don’t like, it’s the few weeks around mid-January where it’s too cold to do anything. We don’t walk outside, we don’t go anywhere “fun” and sometimes we’ll even order our groceries out if the weather gets cold enough. It’s not as bad as the endless summer of Florida was, but it’s…
I’ve Built a Library
I’ve built a library ! One thing I enjoy about having this site is recording bits and pieces of my life. From my work I have my speaking page . There’s also my uses page and my now page , both of which I have the git history of so I can see changes to everything over time. To me they’re a fun record of where I’ve been and something I enjoy sharing with everyone. I’m not a big fan of TV shows, nor…
Deploying My Hugo Site to Cloudflare Workers
Scripts and configuration to deploy a hugo site to Cloudflare workers using GitHub Actions
I’m Ramping Up
This week has been spent ramping up. I’m ramping up at work as we come out of the holiday season and work towards a plan for our new fiscal year that starts on 1 February. I’m ramping up on this site as I work towards fix issues and tune all manner of things after moving it back to Hugo a few weeks ago. I’m ramping up on other side projects while slowly trying to learn Swift and associated techs.…
My Tech Career Has Now Been Longer Than My Aviation Career
Reflections on my tech career as it is officially older than my aviation career was.
Ongoing Feed Work -- My Apologies
If you’re seeing this post or others multiple times in your RSS feed, my apologies. I’m trying to do some cleanup and optimization to my RSS template and I’m afraid it’s probably triggered more than one feed reader. I should be done with this shortly.
My 2026 Hugo Workflow
A high-level overview of how I publish post content to Hugo
I’m going to embrace 2026
My theme for 2026 is going to be to embrace it. Here’s what that means to me both personally and professionally.
2025 in Hindsight
Here we are, the end of yet another year. 2025 was defined by work. It was interesting for me in that I took what many would consider to be a demotion but was, in fact, one of the better career moves I’ve made. From January through July we really didn’t do much. My old job meant I could make no plans and I learned the hard way when I tried to do so. We missed concerts, games and other events we…
Merry Christmas
I’ve got a lot of things I want to write about again: Automating a workflow for blogging in SSGs like Hugo My journey with learning Swift Various Go projects I’ve been playing with My annual end-of-year posts That said, I’m writing this on Christmas Day and family is where my attention rightfully is. We spent Christmas Eve at my Dad’s house where my brother and his family…
A (Hopefully) Final Move Back to Hugo
Here I go again, back to Hugo for this site. I’ll write soon on all the reasons why I’m moving back, for the most part it’s just due to how truly awful WordPress has gotten these past few years at handling simple tasks like writing blog posts. That’s not new though and it didn’t negate the fact that I couldn’t come up with a blogging workflow that worked well…