Last weekend my family and I went to Hood River in Oregon for an event. On the way back they dropped me off in Portland, in the St. Johns neighborhood where my pals Shannon and Isaac live.
I could write about St. Johns’s gritty charm but this post is about a bridge.
Walking on the way to Shannon’s I saw it and had to cross it.
I did and took pictures:
In that last photo you can see there’s a ship stranded on land with no apparent access to the water. My friends took me there later and we saw it up close:
Under the bridge on the St. Johns side there’s a park. Sadly we missed the Frasier club meeting:
I posted earlier about my Daps open source project, and now it has its own website at dapster.org. I learned a bit about Astro while making it (or directing Claude to make it, whatever), which is part of why there’s an Astro template for Daps.
Without AI of any kind, using only my passion for graphic design, I also created a logo:
It’s an open-source framework for managing websites where portability is a first-level feature, so you’re not locked into any hosting provider. It’s called Daps and uses Docker to mirror your local environment to a remote host, and then implements a bunch of workflows to keep your environments in sync.
Partly I made it so I could move my own websites off of their hosting. For example this WordPress site you’re reading right now was on a shared Linux host for over a decade. Now it’s on a VPS host running Docker, and I’ve switched hosts a couple of times already just because it’s easy (and also for testing).
I also just swapped out the theme (from TwentyTen to TwentyTwentyFive — you see how stuck it was), which was kind of seamless. I developed and tweaked the site on my workstation until it was looking “good enough” and then synced it to the remote host in about 10 seconds.
I’m actively developing Daps and will write more about it soon.
I will also note that something like Daps might have been more interesting before the rise of agentic AI, which makes a lot of development and devops effort obsolete. Personally I don’t want to offload all of my sovereignty to AI companies, and this is an expression of that.
This does feel similar to a long project I undertook last year, which was mixing some old An Invitation to Love recordings, which for some reason took forever — it was a lot of trial and error. I haven’t released those and might not, but the value to me was in doing it more than it was in getting it done.
Coincidentally, I just saw this video that talks about this very thing.
I just moved this site from hosted WordPress to hosted containers. Maybe I’ll start posting again. Who knows! But this was a fun project that took a leisurely 15 days or so using Codex for help since I haven’t been very familiar with this style of devops. I’m hoping to post more about it soon.
I have not been writing in this blog lately. It’s a blog though, who is? Anyway, my band Sun Tunnels had some shows recently and this Friday I’ll be playing solo in Tacoma. Check out this poster:
It’s kind of hard to read but it’s $13 and I open the show at 8pm. The headliner is Conversation Pit.
