I stumbled across this set of questions on Shellsharks’ website (which is a cool personal site oozing with inspirational indie web vibes). I thought it was a pretty cool, if not somewhat ridiculous thing to do. So here is my stab at answering 100...
Because of a severe mobility impairment—spinal muscular atrophy—I use a Mac for almost everything I do, and I have a particularly unique way of interacting with it. One of my biggest challenges—aside from typing—is the rather mundane act of...
A bit of website housekeeping. I’m constantly finding cool things on the web. Usually I end up sharing them with different group chats or via direct messages. But I figured I’d start off the new year by finally adding a link blog to my...
I first published this list after seeing a similar post by Robb Knight (2023, 2026) and many others. For each category, I’m listing the app I’m using now, plus my response in 2023 for comparison.
Mail Client
2026: Fastmail.app
2023: Mail.app
Mail...
You may already know about tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) like D&D. They typically have a lot of rules and mechanics and one player serves as the game master, adjudicating these rules as the players describe their actions and roll dice for...
I always feel like I didn’t accomplish much during the year until I start looking at my notes and commit history. Then I find myself pleasantly surprised. I’m eternally intertwined in a battle against routine. I need it—routine—but as the years fly...
Back in October, I had the pleasure of speaking at MagnoliaConf 2025. I was thrilled that the organizers decided to put it together this year after skipping last year. It was perfect timing because I had the chance to talk about something that has...
National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) entered my life in 2010. I was fresh out of grad school and unemployed. I was talking to a friend of mine who had picked up writing as a hobby in retirement. He described this wild writing challenge where...
Now that LLMs have been around for a little while, we can discern what they’re good at and what they’re not. Clearly they are good at using a lot of energy and resources and tend to make things up. But they have also demonstrated to be good...
For years, I’ve used Hoefler&Co.’s webfont service, Cloud.typography, for several of my websites—including, until today, this one. I purchased Operator Mono in 2017 for my code editor and I still use it today.[1] I’ve long admired...
Nowadays I’m used to signing up for services and discovering that the username blakewatson is already taken—yes I’m one of those people who uses their real name everywhere. But that’s okay because I have something the other Blake Watsons don’t. Back...
My first foray into digital character sheets was the 5th edition form-fillable PDF, the official ones from Wizards of the Coast. Those quickly became annoying as there just wasn’t enough space to write everything down, even though it was typed instead...
I don’t know how it got here so fast. I feel behind in life for many reasons, not the least of which is my late start to being employed. But many people feel behind. And there’s no reason to. It’s not a rule that everyone do the same things by a...
May 4 is a special day. Not only because it’s Star Wars day, but because it was on that day in 2015 that I was hired for my first full-time job. Today marks one decade of being employed.
I don’t suppose ten years of being employed is a milestone most...
I’m fascinated by videos and other visual mediums that compare the sizes of objects and structures in the universe. I can’t get enough of them. And I’m not exclusively talking about planets, stars, black holes, etc. There is also the vast, yet tiny...
I’m coming up to a curve in the road. If I’m honest, I’ve already started the curve. My ability to use a hardware keyboard left me a long time ago, but fortunately I’ve retained my ability to use a mouse, albeit with more and more difficulty. I’ve...
Chrome Web Store banner image
In my last post I mentioned that I was working on a rewrite of my *checks notes…* eight-year-old (!) browser extension. In fact, I called it the final rewrite.
Well, that rewrite is finished and A Fine Start is out on...
I’m nearly done rewriting my browser extension, A Fine Start, moving away from Vue 2 and using vanilla JavaScript. I’m calling this the final rewrite, as I’m trying to make it as easy for me to maintain going forward as possible, using as few...
Sometimes it surprises me how things that I consider essential in my life—things that form parts of my identity—might have never found me. Only though happenstance did I learn about these things. People happened to enter my life and introduce me to...
Well, here we are again—another year. They seem to go by faster and faster, and this one in particular did. I’m just now getting used to the number 2024. The idea that it will be 2025 is surreal to me. This next year holds several sentimental...
I’m a big fan of home-cooked apps—a term I first heard from author Robin Sloan and have since run with. A home-cooked app is one that you create for yourself, friends, or family. It’s typically not something you are releasing to the general public....
On Thursday, October 10, I released HTML for People into the wild. I emailed the 300-ish people who had signed up to be notified and then posted on Mastodon. The response blew me away. In a couple of days, my post got boosted over 2,000 times. The URL...
I switch notetaking apps constantly. It’s a problem I’ve had for a long time now. Unfortunately, I’ve probably spent more time hopping around notes apps than taking good notes. I’ve written about some of those times. There was that time I got into...
Spinal muscular atrophy is pretty rare. There aren’t many of us out there relative to other conditions. I always enjoy connecting with people that have SMA, so I thought it would be nice to list out a few of the communities that are available.
I...
The following is a modified version of a writeup I did for my players in a play-by-post game we’ve just started on Discord. I wrote it to give the players a brief summary of the game and also to help myself understand the game, as I am also learning...
I did a bit of a design refresh
Two years ago this month, I decided to make my own little app for keeping bookmarks. I’m a longtime customer of Pinboard, but I was becoming frustrated with errors in its archival functionally and, in general, it felt...
For several years now I have been wondering how I might fit an e-ink display into my workflow. It’s not as simple as just getting one of the cool e-ink tablets that exist. For example the recently announced DC-1 from Daylight Computer looks amazing....
Screenshot of the homepage for posterity. Try changing the color theme :-)
This website began life as a typical personal homepage in the mid-2000s. Having dabbled with WYSIWYG programs for a few years prior, I had finally started learning HTML and...
My brother, Matt, and I decided to explore our fairly different musical tastes and do a song swap. What follows is my reaction to a song of his choice from his collection.
Go check out Matt’s reaction to Lilac Wine by Jeff Buckley.
Song:...
No one is ever going to invent a Blake’s Life Simulator. Well, probably not. I can imagine some quantum computer of the future that allows you to simulate any person given known details of their life and AI-powered estimations.
Short of that, this...
I don’t link to it often but I do have an archive of my old disability blog. It used to have its own domain and everything. I did my best to make sure that old domain and any URLs still work and redirect to this static archive—because cool URIs don’t...
For two years in a row I’ve taken some time off at the end of the year to rest and relax and, most importantly, to work on personal projects. I’ve begun calling it my annual holiday sprint. This past year I ended up building two apps. One is a writing...
I always feel like nothing much happened during the year. I’m not a super active person in terms of getting out and doing things so when I try to think back over the year it all feels kind of same-y. Work, eat, sleep, repeat.
But when I push myself to...
In the fall of 2022, I started using Twitter more. I don’t know why; probably a curious desire to see how bad Elon Musk would screw it up. To make it bearable from a user interface perspective I alternated between the Twitterrific[1] and Tweetbot...
I’m supposed to be frantically writing a story for National Novel Writing Month. But I also have a streak of posting to my blog every month this year and I want to keep it going.
To that end, I’m taking inspiration from Robb Knight and the Hemispheric...
Links and stuff
Here’s quick list of links to the stuff I mention in the talk. Scroll down for the full text. This page is also accessible at .
PDF slides
An app can be a home-cooked meal by Robin Sloan
Start (no longer maintained)
A Fine Start - my...
I’m not a functional programming guru by any means, but I have a passing curiosity and I’ve been trying to learn more about it. I recently dealt with some annoying, repetitive code at work[1] by applying some functional programming concepts.
Here’s a...
In late October 2019, I desperately scoured the NaNoWriMo forums searching for creative inspiration ahead of November’s big writing event.[1] At some point, I decided to write down as many ways to generate a story as I could think of. This was the...
One web browser is plenty for most folks but you might find yourself needing more for various reasons. For instance, here is a handful of activities I can think of that you might want to perform in separate browsers:
Work activity. Maybe you have a...
I had an annoying situation where, when my AirPods connected to my Mac, they would take over as the active input device (ie, microphone). I didn’t want that because I already have a nice microphone setup. So I set out to find a way to prevent that...
In high school, I still had the ability to handwrite, albeit with some difficulty. Toward the end of high school in the early aughts, I was given use of an ancient computer for completing some of my assignments. At that time, typing on a keyboard was...
On June 16, 2023 a storm rolled through Mississippi. Violent straight-line winds and, possibly, a tornado caused several telephone poles in my subdivision to snap and fall, knocking out the power and blocking the only way in and out of the...
One of my favorite game developers, Zachtronics, released their final game, Last Call BBS, a little while back. And in true Zachtronics fashion it fuses programming, retro futurism, and nostalgia to great effect, resulting in a fun, educational, and...
I don’t talk about this often, but I use a team of caregivers to help with all of my daily personal care needs. I’m fortunate enough to be on a program in the state of Mississippi that provides me (and my brother, Matt) with a certain amount of hours...
Pretty soon after learning CSS and building my first few websites without table layouts (yes I’m old) I stumbled across the world of CSS frameworks. The oldest one I can remember using was the 960 Grid System. I guess calling it a framework is a...
I’ve noticed an alarming UI trend over the last five years or so. Apps are neglecting, misusing, or outright omitting the scrollbar from their interfaces. Notice isn’t the right word. I’ve been living this trend.
I have a physical disability that,...
I live a fairly boring dorky, life, often spending my non-working hours engaged in various projects. In 2022, I had a relatively prolific creative spurt. I made some new apps, a couple of video games, and even wrote a novella! Here’s a rundown of...
Update: I gave a talk about this at MagnoliaJS 2023.
Home-cooked apps are the kind you make for yourself that solve your own problems. Much like a home-cooked meal, they can be shared with friends or family. They don’t have ROI, KPIs, or sales...
I’ve never read a novel in which the main character was someone with SMA. As a person with SMA, I’ve always wanted to, though. The First Thing About You is the debut novel by Chaz Hayden. It’s not my usual genre, being a YA rom-com, but I enjoyed the...
Monospaced fonts are the kind that most folks probably associate with a typewriter. It just looks like typewriter text. Programmers often use monospaced fonts in their code editors, which gives monospaced fonts an association of being computer-y...
I’ve been using plain text notetaking applications for over a decade now. Before that I used Evernote, and before that I didn’t really keep any digital notes. [1] I have written previously about notetaking, but that writing doesn’t remain relevant...
Scrolling is hard. I can’t quite use the scroll wheel on my mouse[1] so my options for scrolling are either the keyboard (arrow keys or page up/down) or clicking and dragging the scroll bar.[2] Dragging the scroll bar is a tedious way to scroll (but...
I stumbled upon the synthwave genre[1] when a friend of mine sent me a link to The Midnight’s America Online track on YouTube. I became a little obsessed with the synth-y nostalgia of it all and ended up diving into several artists’ discographies and...
This is an article version of my MagnoliaJS 2021 talk. You can download the slides here.
I often use the phrase “coding by voice” to quickly describe Talon and what it’s for, but that phrase isn’t fully accurate. “Coding by voice” is just a stand-in...
In hindsight, I can’t believe anyone paid money[1] for the first version of d20, which I released in September 2016. But they did, and those few sales I made inspired a much more useful version 2, which was released in January 2018.
By the end of...
Web development provides opportunities to work on different kinds of projects, learn all sorts of things, and dive deeply into specific areas of interest. It makes for a rewarding career choice. But if I’m being honest, the magic of the refresh...
There are a lot of web hosting options. You’ve got popular serverless platforms like Netlify and Zeit Now. If you’re using WordPress, you’ve got fully managed WordPress-optimized hosting services like WPEngine/Flywheel. There are VPS options like...
It’s been a little while since I did one of these, but some big things happened in 2019 in my tiny little world, so here we go.
New job
Starting with the biggest thing first, I started a new job this year. I’m on the frontend dev team at MRI...
Edit, Sep. 29, 2024: I redacted this article for the last few years because it was unfair of me to review an app in beta against other apps that weren’t. It’s been five years and nvUltra is still in beta. At this point, I think this review is fair...
If you make websites, chances are that you work with arrays. A lot. They’re everywhere—a list of posts, a list of followers, a list of links. But working with arrays can sometimes feel a little cumbersome. Sometimes it can take more code than it seems...
Static sites continue to be popular with web developers, a trend that, as far as I can tell, began several years ago[1]. I joined that trend back in 2015 when I made blakewatson.com a static site.
I don’t have any ill-will toward WordPress. It’s a...
Edit 02/2021: this article was written about what is now a legacy version of Talon. The concepts remain the same but the scripts probably won’t work on the latest version of Talon. Visit https://talonvoice.com/ for the most recent documentation.
In...
Edit 02/2021: this article was written about what is now a legacy version of Talon. The concepts remain the same but the scripts probably won’t work on the latest version of Talon. Visit https://talonvoice.com/ for the most recent documentation.
I...
For years, macOS lacked a proper on-screen keyboard. The built-in Keyboard Viewer provided little relief. Many disabled macOS users turned to a third-party option, a $300 piece of software called AssistiveWare KeyStrokes. Despite its cost, it served...
Several years ago, Safari shipped with a terrible, over-the-top new tab page that showed your recently visited sites as a giant TV grid. It even had the signature reflective floor. It looked like this:
Safari 4’s new tab page is an inwardly-curved,...
I joined Facebook in April 2005 shortly after it was opened up to Mississippi State students. Despite being an early Facebook supporter, I deleted my account back in May 2017. Privacy and ethical concerns rank at the top of the list, while other...
Last year, when I read this satire of modern web development, I chuckled. When the npm left-pad dependency controversy left many npm projects unable to build, I questioned what we were doing. These days, I just chalk it up to the maturing of web...
With 2016 coming to a close I wanted to take a moment of reflection — a temporary reprieve from thinking about the future — to review some of my accomplishments on the year. This year had quite a few firsts. I joined the Apple Developer Program and...
Many a library exist for animation on the web these days. Anime is my favorite. It’s approachable,[^1] comes with decent documentation and examples, and packs phenomenal cosmic power in an itty bitty living space (9.15 KB minified).
Anime lets you run...
In 2006 I switched to the Mac after being a Windows user for about 10 years. December this year marks my 10-year anniversary as a Mac user. When I realized that, it got me to thinking about what it is that I have loved so much about the Mac, and why...
I’ll occasionally mention in passing the various alternatives to Google that I use for web browsing, search, and email, but I haven’t talked about it in much detail. I sometimes get funny looks from people when they hear me say that I try to avoid...
I used to be a vanilla JavaScript guy, mainly because I took an excellent JavaScript course at Mississippi State. I put off learning jQuery until I couldn’t ignore it any more. And I’m glad I finally did learn it. It became my standard way of adding...
Monopoly gets a bad rap. Though many gaming enthusiasts will turn their noses at the “Property trading game from Parker Brothers,” it remains one of the best-selling board games of all time. Don’t get me wrong, I like a good game of Settlers of Catan...
As a developer, one tool stands above the rest as the most essential — the almighty text editor. I’ve been a long time user of Panic’s fantastic code editor for Mac, Coda. It packs a lot of features and is a great all around editor. That said, I find...
I’ve owned this little space on the web for a decade. The designs changed radically from version to version. Whatever branding was present changed with it—usually with little thought for the considerations you should make when creating an identifying...
Smart quotes (i.e., “curly quotes”) are a must-have for me. If I were designing a CMS, smart quotes would be included by default. Alas, wok does not include them. But that’s okay because the developer of wok intended for it to be customizable and...
I had a conversation with a co-worker of mine, who is in video production, about what it’s like to watch TV shows and movies when you know so much about the art and science of making TV shows and movies. Where others see dragons and spaceships and raw...
I was thrilled with the idea of pivoting my site from a freelancer’s pitch to a developer’s journal. I really wanted to get back to basics. At its heart, the web consists of words and links to more words. Your browser sends a request for a page; my...
This website started out as a “personal homepage” back when those were still a thing. It was ugly because I was still learning the basics of graphic design and CSS. But it was creative and unique because I was blissfully unaware of many current trends...