This is the first entry into a new blog about building things on the web. Yeah, there are tons of blogs like that out there — but that isn't a deterrent for me today. The Internet does not have everything.
I decided to name this blog "bloat." It's a shorter way to utter and spell "over-engineering," which often is the theme of my personal projects. I will talk about that here a lot.
This entry is written in markdown and hosted on GitHub — not even GitHub Pages, just a file in an open-source repository. That's because I have plans for bloat: it will eventually become a website powered by a closed-source CMS I'm using with my other personal projects. As that happens, I'll share the problems and the solutions I stumble upon here (and I will also discuss my closed- vs open-source decisions). Once the website is live, I'll move all the posts there. Maybe I've already done that and forgot to update this article, so, yeah:
Welcome to bloat, "an honest web developer's blog."
(The tag line is kinda generic, I don't know if it'll stick; I wrote it to fill the repository description without much strategizing.)
My name is Dmitri. I've been building things on a computer since the '90s.
My family left Russia in '99, which has changed a few things, including my worldview. Both of my parents were classically-trained creative professionals in Moscow. They had a ton of education in art and history; however, in Canada, that meant my dad became a labourer, and my mom cycled through a few low-paying jobs over the years.
Being a kid, I blamed our stressful financial state on their chosen vocation. Which steered me more towards science and computers; I wasn't very good, just slightly more interested in technology than the average kid in the early '00s.
In college, my habits and relationships got me closer to art again. I formed a few bands, and started to design stuff on a computer, including sound for our singles and animation for our videos. About 15 years later, my drive to make artsy things lead me to build Analog.Cafe, a blog about film photography. That blog is built on the "in-house" (I'll explain later what I mean by that) CMS that I hope to use for this blog as well.
Professionally, I've been working as a web developer since graduating the University of Toronto. There were a few small startups, including businesses I started solo and with friends. Some jobs allowed me to travel extensively. You may even recognize some brands I work(ed) for: Rakuten and WebMD. I went through two acquisitions, one of which paid off — nothing crazy, less than $100K (I will talk about that also).
These days, I'm a little busy. I live with my wife and two dogs in a small apartment; one of them is a puppy, so he needs a lot of walks and attention. I'm also spending a lot of time on my other blog (and all the associated projects), Analog.Cafe. And, of course, there's that full-time job that pays for all of this. So I am making no public commitments about voluminous content here. But I hope to share something valuable whenever I can — maybe once a month? Who knows.