I’m often happiest with my fingers at the keyboard. (A tap-tap type-type keyboard that is, I’m not a musician)

When the fingers are doing their part and I (the brain, allegedly) am doing mine, the boundary between what I’m imagining and what’s appearing on screen gets deliciously blurry and a feeling of gliding takes over. A gliding punctuated and halted by error messages in my terminal, sure, but we’re soaring again as each one is overcome. This isn’t engineering, not by any measure; I’m not producing anything load bearing.

No, this is tinkering. This is duct tape and prayer. This is “what if I just try…” followed by seventeen Stack Overflow tabs and a script that’s held together with more comments than code. There’s something almost feral about it. Something that tastes like childhood—like taking somehing apart just to see what’s inside, and latterly realising, that was the easy part.

The scripts I write aren’t monuments. They’re little spells. Tiny incantations that automate some annoying thing, or scrape some data I’m curious about, or, or , or

Many of them are alive for maybe three days before I forget they exist. And that’s perfect. That’s the whole point. I want the command line to feel like a playground, not an office. I want my code to be sketches, not oil paintings. Give me the kludge. Give me the hack. Give me the thing that barely works but does work, held together with string and spite and one too many nested if-statements. I want to play.

Here is the newest part of this website of mine. I’ve been knocking about with Linux and BSD since I was a teen, yet I write almost nothing about that (large) part of my life. This little corner of the blog is an effort to rectify that imbalance and actually share some of the things I get up to when I’m staring into this black mirror. There’s very little here at the moment, but that’ll change.