Making

In which the author, after ten years of boring people in pubs about it, finally shows off a tiger, and explains why 300 lines of a language nobody uses might be worth more than a million lines of C++.

In which the author, faced with a wet October and a wall he refuses to put a screen on, borrows a colleague’s good idea and builds a Heath Robinson machine to answer one question twice a day.

In which the author remembers a designer who did not much like him, and finds he is still being taught by her fifteen years on.

In which the author, who once hummed the Indiana Jones theme at a colleague for less, wires his static blog into the IndieWeb and makes it up as he goes.

In which the author, asked by his youngest for help with a cleric, finds the official character sheet wanting and resolves, with some indignation, to print a better one.

In which the author, defeated by a fifteen-letter anagram, builds a solver that is fast, plain and deliberately unhelpful, and then discovers that zip is cleverer than he is.

In which the author explains why Elm gives him joy, confesses to a memory that once won a national competition but cannot manage a shopping list, and learns a bit about how his mind works.

In which the author, between jobs and stalling magnificently, builds an AI coach to drill the STAR interview method instead of actually applying for any.

In which the author admits to a nagging feeling that computing has gone wrong somewhere, points at a tiny algebra that maybe gets a part of it right, and starts building yet another programming language. Sorry.

In which the author extracts a library from his interactive fiction app, and walks the curious reader through the making of their own Z-machine player in around 100 lines of Elm.