Neil Kandalgaonkar

hacker, maker of things

New site launched

chiang-mai-pink-dog by Neil
Shameless unrelated puppy picture

Welcome to the new site! My stuff used to be over at brevity.org, but I’ve blog-ified all the content that was over there, and am having fun making new posts here.

Like a lot of people, these days I’m dissatisfied with pretty much all the social networks out there. App.net isn’t quite ready for prime time. And I’m a bit sick of never having control over my own words.

Plus, I have a lot of longer-form thoughts I want to push out there. You’ve been warned.

Hacking it up

This site is based on Octopress, and I’ve learned a lot of Ruby putting this site together. I’ve always been suspicious of Rails and other ORM frameworks, and I’ve lost my faith in objects, so I don’t think it’s going to be a language that I do a lot of hacking in. The Ruby community is indiscriminate in their love for monkey-patching and metaprogramming, and the spookier features of Ruby still bug me. But…

As you can see I’m tweaked it a lot so I can pull in content from other sites. I think for now I’ll pursue a hybrid approach - I’ll post whereever it makes sense, but copy some of that content here when it’s of lasting value.

In particular I wanted a way to tell stories with Flickr sets. I have used them in the past the way some people use Powerpoint. Check out the entry for HaloWall for an example - the Flickr set is appended at the end.

Finally, I’m happy to say that I wrote a long piece about my experience creating a typeface for Cherokee. I’ve wanted to write about it for more than ten years. It’s interesting to see what’s changed about how I think, and what’s stayed the same. A theme of trusting people over technology - but also seeing technology as an expression of their spirit - has been part of my belief system, perhaps for longer than I know.