A good week! Most visibly, I updated the case studies on this site with lots of new projects over the past three-and-a-half years. Really pleased to have these write-ups done: they illustrate lots of nice angles on my work, and I’m glad to show off Captionhub in detail.

Under the hood, I’ve moved everything over to Hugo and a lot of static files. That’s been a largely delightful process.

I got a little blocked at deployment - I was hoping to move to some kind of CDN-backed deployment, but things were getting a little complex, so I simplified the problem, and just deployed to my existing host.

That involved some neat wrangling of Capistrano. I like cap simply because I use it everywhere, be it for Wordpress (with the composer plugin), Ruby, or static sites. It versions directories, allows for rollbacks, and is a neat layer of glue around ssh.

For this site, I took this sample rsync plugin, and then wrote my own cap tasks so that each deploy checks out the clean site to a temporary folder, runs yarn, runs hugo to build the site, rsyncs that to a server, and finally updates a symlink. It didn’t take long to have that running in my current setup - nice! I might wrap up that rsync plugin into a proper gem next week as nobody seems to have done that yet.

Anyhow, enough about infrastructure.

In new work news, it looks like there’s a writing project - to be known for now as Longridge kicking off next week, and that’ll run in the background for a couple of months. I’ll have more to say on that one in due course, but for now, I scheduled in an early workshop and some onboarding calls.

However, I’m also looking for new projects to run in parallel with that. Ideally, something more technical - prototyping, exploration, or communication and technical consulting. Themes I’m particularly interested in: sound, video, and interaction with those; connected objects and whatever we’re calling “IoT” now; and, perhaps most vitally, tools to empower, enable, and enrich. Work on tools like CaptionHub and instruments like Twinklr and 16n scratches the same itch: giving someone the tool to do work with, to create, and to do things I couldn’t even imagine. I’m interested in continuing to explore that space. get in touch if that sounds like it’s up your street.