Welcome to the new dev-random.me

It’s been over ten years since I last wrote a blog post. Back then, dev-random.me was a WordPress site where I’d occasionally write about tech stuff, but like most personal blogs, it eventually fell by the wayside. For the last several years it’s just been a simple links page, a place to point people to my various profiles around the internet. Functional, but not much else.

I’ve been thinking about wanting to start blogging again for a while now. Not because I think the world needs more hot takes, but because I miss the process of writing things down and working through ideas. There’s something about putting thoughts into words that helps clarify thinking, and I’ve missed that.

More Than Just a Blog #

But this rebuild isn’t just about blogging, the initial motivation was that I wanted a place to host photo albums publicly. I’ve been into photography on and off for years, and I thought having a dedicated place to share photos might motivate me to actually get out and shoot more. I looked at various self-hosted alternatives to things like Google Photos, but most of them felt like overkill for what I wanted; a simple, static photo gallery that I control.

Hugo had been on my radar for a long time, similar to Jekyll but using Go, a language I’m a lot more familiar with these days. So I started exploring whether I could build a photo gallery with Hugo — turns out you can, and it’s been a fun project to put together. I plan write more about how I built it in future posts.

Self-Hosting Everything #

I’ve also been working towards self-hosting everything in an effort to regain control over my data and respond to the ever increasing cost of subscription services. I have a reasonably fast business-class internet connection at home and a server with a ton of storage. Running my own infrastructure is another hobby of mine, and trying things out in my home lab has allowed me to prototype and explore things I otherwise would not be able to at work. I’ve been slowly moving services off of hosted solutions and onto my own hardware, and this site is part of that effort.

Stepping Back from Social Media #

The other motivation for rebuilding the site is that I’ve taken a step back from social media. I did delete my Facebook and Twitter accounts in recent years, and of my remaining accounts I no longer post much. I’ve also removed most of the apps from my phone since I found that the constant stream of content bad for my mental health, and I missed intentional vs algorithmic driven content. I also want a way for friends and family to see what I’m up to without requiring them to be on any particular platform, and to retain control of my data.

This site is my answer to that. Photo albums from trips, the occasional blog post, project updates, all in one place that I control, without algorithms deciding what people see. And thanks to webmention and the IndieWeb, some social features can be retained, even on a static site like this one.

Why “dev-random”? #

If you’re not familiar, /dev/random is a special file on Unix-like systems that serves as a source of randomness. When a program needs random data, for cryptographic keys, session tokens, or just shuffling a playlist, it reads from /dev/random and gets back unpredictable bytes generated from environmental noise in the system.

I picked the name years ago because it felt fitting for a personal site. There’s no particular theme here, no niche I’m trying to carve out. Just whatever happens to be on my mind; a random sampling of photos, projects, and thoughts. Some of it might be useful, some of it might just be noise. I don’t really expect anyone to read any of it, but maybe it’ll be helpful to someone.

What’s Next #

I’m planning to write about some of the technical details of how I built this site, including the photo gallery workflow and the self-hosted infrastructure behind it. If that sounds like something you’re into make sure to check back for updates. And if you have any questions or just want to say hi, feel free to reach out.

Thanks for stopping by and rember to have a lot of fun…