From Distance to Surface

As I’ve been reinventing myself, I’ve been reconsidering nearly everything.

As a nerd, that includes the stack.

PC or Mac.
Mail setup.
What I actually need versus what I’ve just gotten used to managing.

A lot of it comes down to the same question: how do I make things simple enough to focus on bigger things?

Somewhere in that process, I built a new site.

I hadn’t used Astro before.
I hadn’t deployed anything through Vercel.
I hadn’t used GitHub the way it’s meant to be used.

For a long time, that would have been enough to keep me on the outside.

It isn’t anymore.

Within a few hours, I had something running. Within a day, it felt stable enough to build on. Not finished, but real.

I kept waiting for the part where it would push back.

It didn’t.

From a distance, it looked like a wall.

Up close, it behaved like a surface.

I didn’t understand everything. I didn’t need to.

Even GitHub, which I’d always treated like something meant for other people, turned out to be simple once I was inside it. A commit is something you decided to keep. A history is just what changed.

It got ordinary faster than I expected.

Ordinary enough that I’m already thinking about doing it again.

Once something becomes ordinary, you stop asking if you’re allowed to use it.

You just use it.

What the tools removed wasn’t the work.

It was the distance.