Abstract
Web developer and devops by trade. Fanatical about working in text. British citizen, U.S. resident. Amateur radio operator. Extremely amateur guitarist. Sometime photography enthusiast. 20-plus-year Linux and UNIX user.
The Hustle
Day-to-day I work mainly with LAMP and LEMP at every layer of the stack, from hosting infrastructure up to the HTML, graphics, stylesheets and media served to visitors. Most of what I do for a living is in WordPress. Some is entirely bespoke. Some is in Laravel, and historically Symfony. What I do for pleasure or learning could be near enough anything.
More than anything, I solve problems. This doesn't mean I never cause them. Either way, I've developed and honed a skill for finding workable solutions in just about any circumstances, which is rather valuable.
The Story So Far
Travelling over the years from a quiet post-industrial Lancashire town to the glamour and grime of New York City (via the glamour and grime of London), life has at least never been boring. I made a brief stop at the University of Reading beginning in 2001 to collect a Computer Science degree and lend my voice to a few brief seconds of a Hollywood film. Somewhere in the following years I had a nervous breakdown, found singing to be therapeutic, and did a lot of bashing on guitars without really getting good. After a decade in London, somehow I ended up in a whole other country before realising what happened, just as origin and destination alike simultaneously began falling into political insanity. That about brings us up to date.
Mudbrick?
Cegiełka I've always been told translates, variously, as "little brick", "small brick" or even "cute brick". Mudbrick was a nice variation.
Though the name is Polish, I'm not. I don't know for certain how accurate the translation really is, but it's in mind anyway and I like the result.
What's with this site?
So, I'm a developer who does all kinds of Big Heavy Things behind the scenes, but ultimately I want things to be fast and simple. Competitions and manifestos such as The 5k and 10k Apart resonate strongly with me. I could list any number of clichéd aphorisms to communicate my mindset, but I won't. Instead, I'll leave a few principles and circumstances that guided my creative and architectural processes:
- The less a website does, the faster it can be.
- Text is usually going to be less bulky than graphics.
- I work in UNIX terminals with monospace text an awful lot of the time.
- Why not reflect all these things in my own website?
In all, this site has taken maybe a few hours of unfocused work to put together, including the painstakingly slow process of even conceiving the idea and coming up with actual content. Ideation and content creation are not in my normal routine, for the record. There's no complicated CMS (or any CMS). The build system has minimal dependencies - Zola (a portable, single-binary static site generator), optionally running in Docker if you want it. The site does exactly what it needs to with no glitter, but looks significantly nicer than plain unstyled HTML, and reflects the look-and-feel of my daily working environment.
It's been a cinch to also make this thing pass all Lighthouse tests (except PWA) with 100% scores, keep accessibility checkers 100% happy, and as a side benefit get an A score on Qualys SSL Labs.
The HTML is simple, easy to update, and 100% valid according to the W3C validator. The stylesheet is simple. Colour contrast meets WCAG AA requirements across the board, and mostly meets AAA requirements. There is nothing tremendously fancy going on here. This site will be 100% readable and navigable without a stylesheet, too. The only Javascript I wrote powers the tiny, inconsequential easter egg. Nothing breaks if it doesn't run. Cloudflare injects a small script for its email obfuscation. The bulk of the site is content. Highly compressible, easily parsed and rendered content at that.
Employment
I've worked at some places. These are the important ones.