September 4, 2025

Craft & Practice #6

It's been 42 days since my last update; 'cuz I've been buildin', writin', and readin'. These are the high-level highlights.

Hello Internet friends,

According to Buttondown, it's been 42 days since my last update! The count surprised me, along with the little bit of joy on the number itself.

That said, time for an update.

Building

One of the reasons for such a long gap between updates: I've been focused on building out more of my site.

Here's a brief list of new things:

• /work that now has a high-level showcase of projects over the past few years, as well as an abbreviated timeline of my professional career.
• /work/experience is a holistic timeline of my career where I'll be continuing to build out with better information & descriptions (this is also my sandbox for crafting my LinkedIn profile).
• Each /work project has potential features that are present depending on the content available and purposeful need, like: - table of contents, - links to password protected full case studies, - looping project pagination, - endorsement cards from collected endorsements from LinkedIn and ADPList, - and works well for a scaleable structure to continue adding projects as I can.
• updated the structure & content of site's footer
• added "scroll to top" accessibility feature
• aligned the template styles for my prosaic pages (/journal, /essays, and /articles
• added pagination to all the listing page templates
• started adding some of my vibe coding experiments to a /play folder, making small tools for myself
• added status icons to posts for when I'm logged in, to see unlisted posts via my site (to continue editing)

Gardening

I wrote 12 journal entries and 9 articles (6 unlisted and works in progress...). My favorites of these:

• So, you want a website: written as a guide for people who want a website but not sure where to start. It's not fully complete or comprehensive yet, but it is around the size of a typical publication article. ~1,300 words; 5-8 min read.
• Introducing Pagination: is all about how I went about introducing pagination on my site...but it follows my journey into a rabbit hole of numerical scales, ultimately finding a really cool color system (that's reminiscent of my own color-play) from 1772! ~740 words; 4-6 min read.
• Colors, Experimentation, and Through-threads: starting to look at through-threads of my creative practices and how color is a significant, long-held interest. Story-building around playing with colors, and documenting the play and experimentations over the years. ~230 words; 2-3 min read.
• Logical Borders: one of my first attempts at documenting things as I come across them and learn how to use new CSS features...as an article. I did this before with is, not, where, has back in May concerning pseudo-selectors. This time, it's around logical properties and how they are applied to borders. ~300 words; ~2 min read.

Composting

A bit of what I’ve been reading and digesting. Since I’ve been focused on more Building these past 42 days, I’ve fallen behind on an ever growing list of links to read and put up on my site. Since last sharing, I've collected ~130 new links.

Today, you get my top five since last month:

1. Productivity Culture is the Engine of Ableism is a wonderful post by Matthew, The Autistic Coach & Rabbi. One of my favorite quotes:

   Productivity is not the point. Survival is. And beyond survival, something even more radical: joy, interdependence, and liberation.

2. My Identity is a Wave is a beautiful article around migration & belonging by Arzu Geybullayeva. From Azerbaijan, living in Istanbul, reflecting on the missing and chasing aspects of the past of homes & time you can't return to.

   We — the nomads, the non-identifiers, the black sheep — are constantly being asked to align ourselves with the past, to carry its burdens as our own. But perhaps what we should be doing instead is living in the present, and imagining a future where fear-driven ideologies and demagogues no longer shape the terms of our existence. A future where we are free simply to live, to exist, to be.

3. How to rewrite the future is Mike Monteiro's response to the question of the week, "If you could carve a message in stone for future archaeologists to find, what would you say?". His response, "We're sorry." Well worth a read. Here's the first sentence:

   With the many daily horrors that we’re currently experiencing today, from an ongoing genocide, to the kidnapping of our neighbors by masked racist thugs, to the dismanting of our institutions, to the almost total lack of an opposition party, to the etc etc etc—it’s all happening so very fast—it’s understandable that our focus is on surving the present moment.

4. Why I Cannot be Technical is a long-read by Cat Hicks, a psychologist studying software teams, a research architect, an evidence designer, and an empirical interventionist. "Being technical" is one of those things that've been thrown my way quite a bit throughout my career, and her 21-min read article is fantastic. One of my favorite bits:

   In some systems otherness causes smartness to dissolve because otherness is more useful to the system than the smartness. It is therefore not very difficult for me in this system to understand why software looks at me and gets surprised when I know what code is, and then gets angry when I don’t care about code all that much and instead care about the people so much more. Caring about the code is supposed to be what you do to earn being here and I refuse that. I cannot be Technical because I put my caring, my hope, my love, and the center of my universe somewhere else.

5. Reclaiming Energy, Reimagining Power: Building Energy Futures from Below by Madhuresh Kumar is another long read, all about the climate catastrophe unfolding all around the world. Two poignant quotes:

   What masquerades as climate action often replicates colonial logics: militarised extraction, land grabs in Indigenous territories, and green technologies controlled by the same corporate and geopolitical elites responsible for the climate crisis.

   [...] true transition must begin with a shift in who holds decision-making power. Energy sovereignty must include:

   • The right to say no to extraction, even when it is labelled renewable.
   • The right to define well-being beyond GDP or electrification targets.
   • The right to build systems rooted in indigenous knowledge, not technocratic blueprints.

   These are not abstract rights. They are being asserted every day by communities resisting wind farms in Oaxaca, lithium mines in Nevada, or hydropower projects in the Amazon. They reveal the limits of a green capitalism that promises decarbonisation without justice.

Conclusion

That's all folks!

Not entirely. I do hope to get into more regular rhythm. I've had some fun time just sitting and reading these long reads over the past 42 days.

Thank you for reading. Truly appreciate your time and attention, greatly. Welcome any feedback or thoughts!

Be safe; take care,

Jonathan