Personal Webpage of Blake Watson

I’ve noticed an alarming UI trend over the last five years or so.

I live a fairly boring dorky, life, often spending my non-working hours engaged in various projects.

Update: I gave a talk about this at MagnoliaJS 2023.

I’ve never read a novel in which the main character was someone with SMA.

Monospaced fonts are the kind that most folks probably associate with a typewriter.

I’ve been using plain text notetaking applications for over a decade now.

Scrolling is hard.

I stumbled upon the synthwave genre[1] when a friend of mine sent me a link to The Midnight’s America Online track on YouTube.

This is an article version of my MagnoliaJS 2021 talk.

In hindsight, I can’t believe anyone paid money[1] for the first version of d20, which I released in September 2016.

Web development provides opportunities to work on different kinds of projects, learn all sorts of things, and dive deeply into specific areas of interest.

There are a lot of web hosting options.

It’s been a little while since I did one of these, but some big things happened in 2019 in my tiny little world, so here we go.

Edit, Sep. 29, 2024: I redacted this article for the last few years because it was unfair of me to review an app in beta against other apps that weren’t.

If you make websites, chances are that you work with arrays.

Static sites continue to be popular with web developers, a trend that, as far as I can tell, began several years ago[1].

Edit 02/2021: this article was written about what is now a legacy version of Talon.

Edit 02/2021: this article was written about what is now a legacy version of Talon.

For years, macOS lacked a proper on-screen keyboard.

Several years ago, Safari shipped with a terrible, over-the-top new tab page that showed your recently visited sites as a giant TV grid.

I joined Facebook in April 2005 shortly after it was opened up to Mississippi State students.

Last year, when I read this satire of modern web development, I chuckled.

With 2016 coming to a close I wanted to take a moment of reflection — a temporary reprieve from thinking about the future — to review some of my accomplishments on the year.

Many a library exist for animation on the web these days.

In 2006 I switched to the Mac after being a Windows user for about 10 years.

I’ll occasionally mention in passing the various alternatives to Google that I use for web browsing, search, and email, but I haven’t talked about it in much detail.

I used to be a vanilla JavaScript guy, mainly because I took an excellent JavaScript course at Mississippi State.

Monopoly gets a bad rap.

As a developer, one tool stands above the rest as the most essential — the almighty text editor.

I’ve owned this little space on the web for a decade.

Smart quotes (i.e., “curly quotes”) are a must-have for me.

I had a conversation with a co-worker of mine, who is in video production, about what it’s like to watch TV shows and movies when you know so much about the art and science of making TV shows and movies.

I was thrilled with the idea of pivoting my site from a freelancer’s pitch to a developer’s journal.

This website started out as a “personal homepage” back when those were still a thing.