Last year I started making a more deliberate effort to make digital memories of everyday life in the form of audio recordings, photos, and video. While I’ve long been a fan of taking a camera with me on trips, the months-long absences of any photos in my Lightroom library made me realize how much every day life I was neglecting to record.

As a byproduct of this new habit I’ve ended up with a bunch of material documenting in greater detail the electronics and musics side projects that have occupied more and more of my time since 2019. Initially I had hoped that some of this material would make its way to the world in the form of short blog entries but I let self confidence and procrastination get the better of me. In the end I only released a single YouTube video in 2019, a noodle recorded on my DIY-assembled Eurorack synthesizer.

In November last year I had the fortune of attending my first Hackaday Supercon in Pasadena, LA. For those unfamiliar with it, Supercon is best described as a hardware hacking conference, dedicated to people’s extensive making talents. In attending the conference I decided to bring with my Briefbass eurorack setup (a portable 6U ~100HP setup built from a Samsonite briefcase), primarily to share with some close friends who were also attending. Given the magnitude of the other projects that people bring to Supercon I hadn’t expected that it would get any notice but I ended up having a number of really great conversations with people and also gave a few hands-on introductions to others. The experience made me realize the importance of sharing projects openly in a community and engaging others.

Taking that lesson and applying it a little closer to home, I decided this last weekend to invest some time in improving my writing setup, specifically with the aim of making publishing extremely easy. While I’m a big fan of Hugo, my direct to S3 upload approach meant that I could only post updates from the one machine with valid personal AWS credentials.

Now with the help of some fancy Github Actions I need only update the Git repository with new source content, and it will take care of the rest. The entire workflow definition is just over 40 lines and straightforward to follow. This brings the act of writing and publishing into reach of something that can be achieved with an iPad and a half hour of focus time. I’ve not decided to take a specific writing goal or number, but I do hope that the sum of these small changes leads to more and more frequent creative output in my future.