While, yes, I work at a bike shop, this time of year, I spend most of my time on the computer. I’m the marketing manager, so my days are spent spinning up new design assets in advance of the season, plotting marketing campaigns, and sprucing up our websites (one for the shop, one for the tours/rental business). It’s more time on the computer that ideal, perhaps, but the boss is good about building time in for me to do little mechanical things here and there, sit behind the counter at the shop, etc. But I’m on the computer there a lot, and lately, I’m on the computer at home a lot, too.

Coding.

This is not necessarily anything new.

I built this site, and my “resume site,” and I built a super-secret site for some of my fellow grad students as a sort of trial-run for this project I’ve got kicking around in the back of my head called “The Work and Response.” I like building websites. I’m not the best designer, but I get the things built and I think they look alright. I use Sass and a proper text editor and am trying to learn Gulp (which is fucking me up with the whole new version thing) like a proper web developer guy. I’ve thought about dusting off what I knew of Javascript. I’m taking a class this semester that I’m calling “Poetry and Programming” in my head because I can’t ever remember the titles of things.

But I never wanted to be a developer, you know?

Stupid, really. I’m not bad at it. I pick these things up pretty quickly. I’ve technically been coding websites since I was 11 or 12. I’m sure, given a few months, I could be up to scratch enough to get a real programming job. But alas: that’s what my dad did for a long time, and I’m still a teenager in the back of my head sometimes, wanting to do something like rebel.

But this class, you know? I’m real excited about it. We’re going to be doing a bunch of conceptual work around computing, I believe, and we’ll learn Python, and fiddle around with microcontrollers and various other kinds of hardware. Pretty exciting stuff, given that I haven’t really had the opportunity to play with that sort of thing since I left St. Louis, where I’d set up a RaspberryPi VPN at my house and worked on a “hardware hackathon” project team at work. (I was getting pretty good at the hardware part, but I’m 100% sure my soldering skills have lapsed since then.)

But a very good friend of mine was in town just before the holidays, a front-end guy now working and living in the Bay, and we got to talking, and he kind of got me interested again. Got me thinking, huh, if this whole writing thing doesn’t work out…

So I’m learning more code again. Trying not to let it get in the way of my writing (dreaming about bike builds is still top on that list). Trying to be conscious of time spent, but also of the cool things I could build that I kind of care about. Like the thing for my classmates.

And anyway, this blog was out of date, content-wise, for a long time, and it’s now out of date per the current version of Jekyll, so, you know, at the very least I’ve got to get this thing running again, you know?