The Lonely Tree by the Sea

The image you saw on the homepage is one that has evolved over the years from a rendering I did in Bryce 5 sometime in the early 2000s as a high schooler (shown above). It’s been a motif now through nine redesigns of the personal site that I originally launched in 2005. I’m not exactly sure what it represents, but the feeling it invokes in me is as powerful today as it was when I first watched the pixels appear row-by-row on a bulbous CRT monitor many years ago. Its interpretation is left as an exercise to the reader.

Netizen

I believe 1997 was the year I got on the Internet. I would have been 9 then. For all of the personal challenges it presented me, going to school in the Québec system is the reason I became tech-savvy.

I’ve never confirmed this with anyone who works in Québec’s government, but I suspect they made computer literacy classes mandatory as a strategic move to ensure that the francophone vocabulary for the Internet could take root. Québécois has pretty unique terms for computer-related stuff, like courriel for email (I believe France just calls it email).

In 1998, I found a book in the library describing how to write HTML. I made my first webpage in notepad at age 10. From there, I was hooked.

Favorite places on the Internet

Until 2009 or so, I would read Slashdot everyday. I never created an account and therefore never commented.

From 2009 until 2022 or so, I read Hacker News almost everyday. I also never created an account and therefore have never commented.

HN was my Room of Requirement. It’s uncanny the number of times it surfaced the answer to something I had been thinking really hard about.

HN is the reason I started running all those personal development experiments. HN is the reason I took the plunge to become an entrepreneur. HN is the reason I got way smarter.

It’s possible that I’m a weak AI who simply trained sufficiently on HN comments for over a decade.