A sign of life

#personal#life update

Wow! It’s been over 2yrs since I’ve created a new post on the old blog.

Sad.

But oh well - we’re here now, and that’s what’s important.

At least that’s what they say, or something like it, right?

So what’s been going on in the life of Matt - that’s why you’re here, after all, right?

Or maybe it’s the 7yr old post about updating the firmware on an Ender 3… Actually, based on the web analytics, it’s definitely the 7yr old Ender 3 post for some reason…

Anywhos.

For the observant reader, I hope you like my new home! After literal decades of begrudgingly setting up new instances of Wordpress, I figured I’d do the inevitable “shoot myself in the foot”, “it’s not like I don’t already have enough to juggle and maintain”, ROLL MY OWN BLOGGING SOLUTION thing that every engineer seems to eventually do!

Exciting!

So if not Wordpress, what-press?

I opted to go with statically-generated Astro site using Content, Collections, and file-based routing — zero client-side JavaScript framework, just Markdown and Astro components.

So the stack:

  • Scripting to extract individual HTML posts from the XML Wordpress backup
  • AI-assisted content review and flagging script to identify cringy / no value posts for my review
  • Script that converts approved posts to appropriately formatted markdown
  • Astro:
    • Static Site Generation (SSG) — all pages pre-rendered at build time, no server runtime
    • Content Collections with Zod schema validation for type-safe frontmatter
    • File-based routing with dynamic routes ([slug].astro) generated via getStaticPaths()
    • Zero-JS by default — pure Astro components, no framework (React/Vue/Svelte), no islands.
      • Disclaimer: The only client-side JS is a small inline script for theme switching (sorry. not sorry. I wanted it)
    • Markdown-first with MDX available via integration
    • Integrations: MDX, Sitemap, RSS
  • Cloudflare hosted (free) - auto-deploy on push to private repo (or trigger via Cloudflare)

So, maybe not as simple as clicking ‘New Post’ in the Wordpress admin portal, but also way more fun and to my liking. And, honestly, not much more difficult than the Wordpress flow to create a new post - can do the same via GitHub web portal, just with a couple extra clicks.

I figuring having complete control is worth the extra clicks - and if I get bored enough, I can probably script it down a click or few.

So aside from recreating my digital self, what’s been going on?

Well, work… Lots and lots of work - but that’s no fun.

So side projects.

I launched The New Guard, which has been fun - and has enabled me to learn a lot of really cool, bleeding edge stuff in the AI space, and then to share that with others, which I’ve always loved.

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As mentioned, I’ve been pretty deep in the AI/LLM space, which has been really exciting - reminds me of my early days on the internet in the mid/late 90s and early 00s… So much new - more every day. Exciting new technologies and spaces emerging seemingly overnight. So much opportunity. But also a great deal of uncertainty of what this all means for the future, though a high probability that my field will never be the same, and that the transition will likely result in a lot of humans no longer being needed (but I’m going to ride this flaming rollercoaster for as long as I can, having fun along the way)…

So far as consumer offerings in the AI space, I’m an Anthropic fanboy and absolutely love working the Claude ecosystem - so much so that I wrote an automated orchestration tool, TaskSmith CLI, that I’ve been dogfooding some development with. Writing it was fun, though maintaining it has proven to be a challenge - as just as soon as I come up with an idea and actually implement it, Anthropic releases a very similar capability natively for Claude 🤣 But I don’t let that get me down - I just take it as a complement, and as validation that, despite being old, I’ve still got a pretty good pulse on emerging spaces.

What else… Lots of LLM experimentation… I’ve done a bit of training, abliteration experimentation, dabbled in local model creation, creating agents, writing orchestration and harness tooling, local hosting of LLMs and personal agent solutions (OpenClaw was fun 🦞)

And then, of course, just lots of coding experimentation… Lots of abandoned projects and discarded code - but that’s just part of my process.. It’s how I learn… how I grow… how I procrastinate…

Anywhos… There’s more.. But I need to get to the gym before work, so I will put a pin in it for now.

Thanks for visiting! It was good catching up!

More to come?

-Matt