First of all, I'm going to be fine, I'm just going to be very busy and stressed for awhile. Nothing I can't handle, I promise. However, some recent stuff in my life means that this blog is going to change a little bit, and not just in the sense of slowing down, until my life gets back to a more stable, normal routine.

So what's going on? Well, on top of being sick, and moving to a place where I'll be less sick (and have lower cost of living), I very recently lost my day job for broader economy reasons. This means I have to move on a tighter timeline than I expected, multitask moving and job hunting, etc. I'm not the only income in my household, and the budget spreadsheets are all looking okay, but I'm not going to have a day off from time-sensitive logistics problems this month.

I think it's probably obvious that, in demanding times like these, my blog is one of the things I can most freely choose to spend less time on, leaving room for more essential effort, so I'm going to be more quiet on here for a little while. That's true, but there's more.
## Writing style

My tone on this blog is generally pretty informal, for a couple reasons. First of all, to preserve my right to speak informally in a personal/private space, which is something I care about. Tone is a cue that helps people understand that, even if guests are welcome and freely offered public value, this isn't a digital public plaza, _it's my digital house,_ and if I can't wear sweatpants in my own home, I've ceded my home to squatters.

Secondly, it allows me to write educational material for a much broader audience than I could have otherwise, which is also something I value. Making one-size-fits-all articles about technical topics is probably impossible, so my goal is something closer to: if you show up to my blog with even a small amount of computer literacy, you will walk away with some non-zero amount of new understanding. That goal is merely _difficult_, and one of the best tools I have is to get a little silly or anthropomorphic, and lay out the emotional bones of a topic first, so the fleshy details have context. I don't add in swears and memes purely for my own amusement - they're load-bearing infrastructure! It means anyone who can understand the swears and memes - a pretty broad base of people - can follow what I'm writing, fill in blanks in their understanding, and be able to usefully recognize terms and ideas in the wild later.

With the economy being what it is right now, I'm probably going to have to treat this space - at least for awhile - as a portfolio that I can comfortably link to when talking to potential employers, and tame some of my writing choices accordingly. This means I'm going to need to make a confession to all of you, here and now.

I don't actually hate Haskell developers. I'm a fake hater. 😔

I know I make jokes at their expense regularly, and it's very difficult to have discipline about this, as making fun of Haskell is very easy. But I _am_ being pretty tongue-in-cheek about this, and I spent most of my time at my last job doing work in a functional language. In fact, I'd say that learning a functional language is something that will probably make you a better programmer, if you haven't done it yet. I still prefer non-functional languages[^1], but I have a clearer idea which good ideas are worth stealing, which ideas I disagree with, and how to articulate my rationale to a higher standard than _LMAO XD funny tribalism!_ Even as someone who went to the cathedral and never became a convert, I can tell you, it was worth my time as a tourist, and would probably be worth yours too.
## Hosting

I'm about to be doing a lot of travel by car and living light in a temporary situation. My webserver laptop does not have a battery in it, because the last battery got a bit puffy and needed to be removed for safety. Taken together, it makes a lot of sense for me to temporarily get some cheap VPS hosting (of which many options are available in 2026) and just run my website off of that until I have the longer-term living situation nailed down.

I still need to research my options, since I haven't looked into this kind of thing in probably ten actual years, which might as well be fifty in an industry that changes as quickly as cloud hosting. Is DigitalOcean still good? Should I try to dig up my old Linode password? I'd prefer not to use AWS[^2], but is it such a good price that it's an offer I can't refuse? These questions and more are on my mind as I rediscover the personal small-scale hosting realities of the present day.

Thankfully, I don't have a lot of secondary services running on my site right now, and in fact, my website has never been lighter to relocate to a VPS. I run a FreshRSS instance that I'm going to stub out for a few months rather than migrate to the VPS, but that's about it. And the main site I care about keeping up, is really just a static website hosted with a particular Nginx configuration - no custom webserver doing access control with the ability to see my whole Obsidian vault, just the output of a static site generator being run on my personal laptop.
## Schedule

I'll probably actually have _more_ time for writing and editing a few weeks from now. There's only so much of the day you can actually make progress on a job search! And in fact, I've always been most productive on hobby stuff between jobs, like that whole era I was doing live streaming on Twitch, so I'm expecting to get some momentum on Prone again soon.

There's a reason I'm using weasel words here and not promises. I have a lot of administrative labor ahead of me, and hopefully surgery + recovery. There are way too many unknowns, and way too much schedule fluidity, for me to commit hard to any expectations about time devoted to my website. And frankly, whenever my surgery does happen, I plan to spend my prescription painkiller time failing to beat Silksong, rather than failing to write coherently about how magnetic domain theory is a great analogy to think about function sizes.[^3]

Anyways. I have to go work on the bin packing problem in real life for a bit. Thanks for being my readers, even in the most chaotic of times.

[^1]: I still plan to eventually write a more complete post about how the idea of an FP vs OOP dichotomy is harmful to programming discourse, how I've come to feel strongly about data purity as distinct from functional purity and why, etc. Today is not that day.

[^2]: To be clear, I've used AWS to some degree at every place I've worked so far, and I'm fine with doing that... at work. In my personal projects, AWS usually isn't the best option: it's more complicated than it needs to be, not always the bargain you'd expect, can require subtle attention to avoid surprise large one-off bills, and the person I'm making richer is Jeffrey Preston Bezos. It's worth at least a small effort to search the field for alternatives.

[^3]: Not a joke, that's actually in my backlog. Whether there's enough material for a substantial post, I'm not actually sure yet! It might be a shorty.