After years of thinking “I should make a blog”, I’ve done it. For the time being this content is stored at blog.mackieburgess.com.
My name is Mackie. I grew up on Shetland: a small-ish archipelago between Faroe and Norway. I’m now living in Glasgow for the foreseeable future.
I’ve been ‘programming’ for ages. First Python and PHP and Liquid while I was still in school, then mostly Rust and Java and more Python while at university; now I write a lot of Typescript at work, which I’m relatively pleased with (both the job and the language). I want to write more OCaml.
For a quick colophon: this blog is currently made using Lume, a Static Site Generator for Deno. I am thoroughly impressed, which says a lot given how complain-y I can be about technology stacks. The CSS was put together in a very hasty and haphazard manner, I should probably clean it up a little at some point.
I don’t really know what I’m going to write about, but one of my goals is to use this blog to get better at writing, and to get better at documenting the things I’m thinking about, and to give myself a platform in order to engage more deeply in side projects.
Another goal is to do a big project and write a really long blog post about it. This is essentially me putting myself through the same hell as my final-year dissertation but with different framing. I’ve often found that doing a similar thing as before but with different framing can make it much more enjoyable, or make the end result much better.
Overall, I hope this represents a shift from passively being all about making digital things to actively being all about making digital things :)