Welcome back!

I'll leave the enormous, cathartic post-lockdown post for another time. Here's a quick run down on where I'm at now.

Some 2022 things

A bunch of stuff happened last year, but I didn't get things together enough to blog at all.

Here is the TL;DR

1. March 2022 - After 4 wonderful years, I left my casual job at National Gallery of Victoria and began an exciting new role at Victoria University as Senior Front-end Developer. At NGV I was working on an enormous monolithic Wordpress website. I'm now working on a decoupled Nuxt.js front-end as the rest of the team migrate to an updated Drupal CMS.
2. May 2022 - I became completely obsessed with collecting and painting miniatures from the Warhammer 40000 Kill Team tabletop skirmish game. My new years reso is to join a club, and play an actual game!
3. November 2022 - Finally released the remastered version of my old band I Am The Agent's first EP Volume One. We originally released it in 2009, as a CD-R that you could only buy at our gigs. It's an indie-rock / alternative / grunge-y sort of thing. It's available most places where you can stream music.
4. December 2022 - Soon after, I released my debut album as my musical alter-ego, Whalebones called Every Alterations. It's available to stream on Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple Music, and other places. It's experimental electronic music for fans of: Four Tet, Caribou, Thom Yorke, Holy F*ck.

New wobsite

Also, hey! You're reading this on my new website! It borrows elements from the last iteration, but the code-base is leaner and meaner, and a lot more practical for me to add content to.

I'm still JAM-stacking, with the following changes:

• Bump from Nuxt 2 to Nuxt 3
• Switched from Netlify to Vercel.
• Switched from SSG to SSR JAM-stack model.
• Switched from a nothing system to an atomic design system.
• Updated the main theme and added a basic dark mode theme.

There are still more bits and bobs to add, but the MVP is ready. I'm happy.

Lets go with the content right now, please!

Screen cap from the sketch show "I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson"

One, two skip a few

Now it's almost June 2023 (oof, spooky).

In the last few months I've finally started decompressing from the 200+ day lock-down trauma. I've started reconnecting with - and reevaluating - some of my core values.

Music

I actually feel less connected to music at the moment. I feel more open to changing my beliefs in this area and I'm interested to see if shifting this value will help me open up new modes of expression. I have held on to this hobby and enshrined it as a part of my identity - without necessarily understanding the weight of that decision. I want to be able to love it again - and to do that I think I need to let it go.

This feeling may change at any time, and that's ok!

Technology and the web

Likewise, I feel less connected to technology. Given the web has become such a powerful tool for the spread of misinformation, online harassment and bullying, addiction, privacy concerns (among other terrible things) - I guess its only natural to feel hesitant to participate within it currently.

However, my engaging with web technology pays my bills. So, if I'm privleged enough to be hanging around here anyway, I want to be producing content and not consuming. Thus, the rebirth of my blag!

I've likewise deleted all of my Tw*tter accounts and moved to a single account on the hachyderm.io instance (https://hachyderm.io/@miclgael). It feels really, really good to have a feed full of like-minded tech-folk instead of the usual stream of hatred and negativity. The lack of an algorithm takes a sec to get used to, but it doesn't take long to find people to follow.

Meta's IG is on the chopping block for me at the moment also. I have deactivated my account at the time of writing - which sort of goes in-hand with the music-shifty-thingy I just mentioned.

Okay last few bits

Here are the names of the first couple of new posts. Mostly so I can hold myself accountable and actually write something even if they're insignificant little tech things.

• Elk's cool border-radius trick
• Exploring Nuxt 3 layers

I'll update these to link to the articles as soon as they're published.

So, how are you?

Love, MG