It's been quite a while since I wrote here... 8 years - 2 days to be exact. Still alive.
Life happened during this time away. New skills were forged, and also dwindled away by the force of AI. LLMs are everywhere.
They have changed the way I work, how I search for information, and how much code I actually remember how to write without some assistance. It is great to describe a problem and immediately get something that almost works. The “almost” part is important. You still need to understand what it produced, especially when it confidently invents a function, a configuration option, or an entire version of reality.
Coming back to this website felt a little like opening a time capsule. Some of the code was written by a version of me that apparently liked creating features and then forgetting to finish them. There was an empty Let's Encrypt administration page, a Journal prototype with buttons that did nothing, and a Twitter widget that had stopped being useful a long time ago.
Naturally, there were also several unfinished projects. At least that part of the website was still accurate.
The site itself was still running on an old version of PHP. Somehow, most of it continued to work. The blog posts were still here, the images and GIFs still rendered, and the database survived all these years. That is probably more than I should have expected from code I had barely touched since 2018.
It has now been moved to PHP 8.4 inside its own Docker container. The design was also updated, the broken Twitter widget was removed. The tags are still colored, of course. Some things are too important to remove.
The Lab also received a new design. I would like to say this means it will be updated regularly with new experiments and finished projects, but the last eight years provide strong evidence against making that promise. It will continue to be a place for ideas, prototypes, and projects that may or may not reach the finish line.
A lot has changed since the previous post, both in software and outside it. Frameworks appeared, became popular, and were replaced before I even had time to complain about them here. AI started writing code. JavaScript probably gained another few thousand ways to build the same website. PHP is still alive. Apparently, so is this blog.
I don't know how frequently I will post from now on. Hopefully, the next one will arrive sooner than eight years from now. If it does not, at least the website should be better prepared to wait for it.
Thanks for reading. See you in eight years! (Hopefully sooner.)
(Disclaimer: This article was fully written by AI from the completion of the first two initial lines, but it is eerily accurate.)