About this Blog (v5.0)

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Cassie is my 7½-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page in March 2021. Quite a lot has changed since then, most notably I wrote a whole new blog engine. (More on that in a moment.)

About the blog

The Daily Parker is about:

• Cassie, whom I adopted on 16 March 2021. (The blog is named after my previous dog, Parker, whom I adopted in 2006 and who died in 2020.)
• Politics. I'm a moderate-lefty by international standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's United States. And I'm looking forward to the day, whether 20 January 2029 or earlier, when we can start repairing all the damage caused by this rogue administration.
• The weather. I've operated a weather website for more than 27 years. That site deals with raw data and objective observations. Many weather posts also touch politics, given the political implications of addressing climate change, especially given the OAFPOTUS's hostility to science.
• Chicago (the greatest city in North America), and sometimes London, San Francisco, and the rest of the world.
• Photography. I took tens of thousands of photos as a kid, then drifted away from making art until early 2011 when I finally got the first digital camera I've ever had whose photos were as good as film. That got me reading more, practicing more, and throwing more photos on the blog. In my initial burst of enthusiasm I posted a photo every day. That frequency is incompatible with having a life, so I don't update this category very often.

I also write a lot of software, and will occasionally post about technology as well. I've got more than 45 years experience writing the stuff, 30 as a professional. I own Inner Drive Technology, a microscopic software development company in Chicago, which has some interesting packages available on NuGet. I see a lot of code, and since I often get called in to projects in crisis, I see a lot of bad code, some of which may appear here.

I strive to write about these and other things with fluency and concision. "Fast, good, cheap: pick two" applies to writing as much as to any other creative process (cf: software). I hope to find an appropriate balance between the three, as streams of consciousness and literacy have always struggled against each other since the first time someone put chisel to tablet 5,500 years ago.

Finally, given that I started this blog almost 23 years ago, it has old and crappy examples of my writing and of my opinions. I have evolved quite a bit. Author John Scalzi put it perfectly: the guy I was in 1998, the guy I am now, and the guy I'll be in 2036 are three different people.

About the blog engine

Now let's talk about the software the blog runs on. In 2016, I had an idea for software that would allow users to put together a timeline of events. The software needed to have seriously strong privacy protections, because I envisioned it as something people could use as a personal journal, or as a way to organize a legal case, or as a cache of sources and notes for a journalist.

I started writing the software in 2020, but put it aside until I had a burst of inspiration about a year ago. From that point I made slow but steady progress, until the BlogEngine.NET platform that The Daily Parker had run on since 2015 basically wouldn't run anymore without frequent reboots and cursing. That got me thinking, wouldn't the minimum viable product for a timeline application be, in fact, a blog engine?

Over the next few days and weeks, I'll have a series of technical posts about how I developed it and how it works. Check back on this post for links, or just watch them come up on the new posts page.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you continue to enjoy The Daily Parker.