This post is seven years in the making. It began in 2005 when I was studying Art History at the University of Kansas and just beginning to learn HTML and CSS.

Seven years. What took so long getting here? A really bad case of DIY.

Bare with me, as I remember how to write words.

Early in my career I had the fortune of working with some very smart web professionals at the Lawrence Journal-World. The people and the environment at the Journal-World fueled my curiosity to better understand the tools we were using to build the web.

In an effort to learn Django, I decided to do what all good Django developers do and write a blogging application. I wrote a simple app and it worked well. I spent most of my time making AJAX comments work. 2008. lulz.

But I didn’t write any blog posts.

Instead, I found distractions with new tools or new techniques. I put my blog app down long enough I came up with a new idea for publishing posts. DIY strikes again. Back at the drawing board, I ended up with the app I’m publishing this post from now. (More on this soon.)

I’ve become quite good at tinkering in my spare time, working on neat experiments and trying out new toys. My blog app isn’t what I would consider “finished”, but I’m forcing myself to start putting words down before I get distracted again.

Oh look! Shiny.