Symbolic Forest

A few months ago, I wrote about my first exploration into the world of mechanical keyboards, and said, at the time, “am I going to turn into a keyboard nerd?” At that point, I’d found that mechanical keyboards can be extremely practical, that I found them much, much easier to type on than a cheap stock keyboard; but I was very wary of how keyboard nerdery can turn into something expensive and all-consuming. Frankly, I already have too many expensive and all-consuming hobbies. So. Did I succumb?

Well… sort of. It hasn’t become all-consuming, at least not yet. This, though, is how my desk looks now. Yes, that is another keyboard.

This is a slightly fake photo, I have to admit, because I’d never use both at once. The bottom one in the photo is the Keychron K10 chassis I wrote about previously, but with a prettier set of keycaps. The black pudding keycaps I bought were fine as a first set, but they weren’t really pretty. Moreover, the switches I’d fitted don’t really let enough light through for the translucent part of the pudding to work as expected. The shine-through colours were quite dim, only really visible in a darkened room. Because of this, the keycaps have been replaced by something prettier, a purple gradient set with blank tops.

Above is the new keyboard, a Royal Kludge 65% model in a pink and white colourway, with slightly less key travel. The reason they don’t normally come out together is: this is my new “travel keyboard”, small enough to fit into my work backpack alongside my laptop. It’s wired only, so I bought a matching pink cable to go with. It’s not too loud for office use, but it’s definitely eye-catching; so far I’ve hardly had a single office trip without at least one person asking me where I got it.

“Now hang on there cutie,” I can hear you saying, “didn’t you already talk about a smaller keyboard in your last keyboard post?” Well yes, I did. But as I said at the time, that keyboard is a 60% model. This one is a 65%, and that extra five percent makes all the difference. It means this one has dedicated cursor keys, rather than have the cursor functions doubled-up. In other words, I can code without chording. It makes my life much easier. Moreover, this one is lighter and less bulky in the backpack, due to the lower travel, and is slightly quieter and less annoying to colleagues. It’s also deliberately intended to go with a new-to-me laptop I’ve been playing with, a small pink model that used to belong to The Child Who Likes Fairies, which I’ve wiped and put Gentoo Linux on, so that I can use it as a small, lightweight laptop to use if I’m ever going to be forced to use a small, lightweight laptop for any period of time—in bed recuperating from anything medical, for example. I wasn’t completely sure how well Bluetooth would be likely to work with Linux on a random laptop, which is the main reason I plumped for a wired-only model.

Are there going to be more keyboard developments. Well… maybe. The blank top keycaps on the Keychron do have shine-through legends on the key fronts, which are a bit ineffective in the same way as the pudding keycaps were. The “clicky” switch I still have on the Insert key is a transparent-body switch, by pure chance—I found it in a friend’s spares box—and I can see what a big difference that makes to the shinethrough effect. Because of that, a set of transparent-body red switches and a keyboard rebuild might be on the horizon at some point; there’s no rush, though. Aside from that, though, I do have enough keyboards now, including keeping that first one as a spare. If I find myself tempted to buy more, I really should just sit on my hands.

Keyword noise: keyboards, mechnical keyboards.

For once, I have managed to continue on with the ongoing craft projects without starting any new ones for, ooh, must be nearly a couple of months now. Most of the crafting time has been devoted to the cross-stitch project I mentioned back in July. Despite a break for my holiday—because it’s too large to go in the luggage—I’ve got on quite a way with it. Here’s the progress to date.

It’s quite hard to take a decent photograph of, because that black background greatly confuses any camera which attempts any degree of automation. Maybe I should try telling them to use Night Mode.

Keyword noise: crafting, sewing, cross-stitch, current projects.

Recently I added Aria Salvatrice to the list of links over in the menu, because I’m always looking to find new interesting regular reads, especially ones that use old-fashioned blogging. In this case, I found myself reading one of its posts which I absolutely found myself nodding along to. It was: Video Tutorials Considered Harmful, about how videos are a much worse venue for learning a technical topic than written documentation.

In general, I agree wholeheartedly with this, with an exception that I’ll come to below. Aria gets to what I think is the nub of the problem: that for some people, with some forms of neurodiversity, it’s really, really hard to focus on the video enough to take it in properly and digest it, and far too easy to get distracted. Your mind just wanders off, in a way that doesn’t happen—or at least not as much—if you’re reading a written text. All of a sudden, you realise that your head has been completely elsewhere for the last five minutes, and you have no idea what you’re watching any more.

What I find strange about this in the tech world, though, is that neurodiversity is hardly rare among software developers and similar professions. This is definitely something that has come up with my current colleagues more than once: the fact that a good proportion of us have this same problem: if we start watching an explanatory video, our minds wander off. All of a sudden, we’ve missed a huge chunk of everything and have no idea where we are. If this is so common among tech practitioners, why are these types of video common in the tech world?

The Plain People of the Internet: But don’t you yourself there have your own YouTube channel?

Yes, I do, but I don’t use it to try to teach you things. Not technical things, at any rate. They are turned into text and posted here, or wherever is most relevant. I don’t create videos of myself lecturing to camera.

That brings me onto another aspect of this, though: the difference between good and bad videos, and how bad videos make things ten times worse. Now, I haven’t posted anything on YouTube for quite a long time, but that’s largely because of the effort involved in making a video that I think is good enough to put out there. In short: I edit. I don’t just live-record a video of me doing something, chat as I go along and upload it; instead I edit. I cut it down, I write a narration, I record and edit that and stitch the whole thing together so that a project that took me several days in real life becomes a ten-minute video. In the sort of tech videos I’m talking about, this often doesn’t happen. Aria writes about this in its original post:

[M]ost video is entirely improvised, and almost never cut to remove wasted time. People’s thoughts meander. Their explanations take five sentences to convey what a single one could have said with more clarity. They wait on software to load, and make you wait along. They perform a repetitive task six times, and make you watch it six times, they perform a repetitive task six times, and make you watch it six times, they perform a repetitive task six times, and make you watch it six times […] And while it is easy to skip repetitive text, it is difficult to know where to skip ahead in a video.

Because, actually editing that down, writing a script, making it concise and informative is itself a skill, a hard one to learn. It’s difficult work. Much easier to just video a stream-of-consciousness ramble and push the whole thing up to the Internet unedited. And that’s why people do it: it’s similarly easier than writing good documentation. Knowing how to explain something you know well, to someone who knows little about it, is also a surprisingly difficult skill that a lot of people don’t even realise they don’t have.

This doesn’t necessarily apply with videos demonstrating physical things that are much harder to describe than to show, by they way. Crafting tutorials, for example, such as How To Crochet A Magic Ring. Even in that case, though, the good ones are carefully edited, brief, clear and concise.

In short, what I’m saying is that video has taken over (to some extent) from written documentation because if you’re willing to accept low quality, it’s much easier to produce, even if the results are worthless. It’s inevitably lower-quality, though, because of all the flaws in the format mentioned in Aria’s piece, such as lack of searchability. It’s accidentally low quality because if the creators put the effort in to make it good, it would take as much or more effort than writing good textual documentation takes. Those flaws can be fixed by putting the effort in and learning to skills to make a good video; but the inherent flaws of the format can’t be changed. Better all round to produce written documentation from the start.

Keyword noise: documentation, video, learning, coding, software, software development.

Very eagle-eyed regular readers might have noticed that a few days ago I added a new category to the list of post categories over in the menus. It’s quite a rare event, to be honest: most of the categories have been there for many years, and new additions really don’t happen very often. Before this week, the last one I think was Being Crafty, which arrived several months ago.

The new category is This Is Not A Memoir, and in a sense that title could apply to every single thing I post here. The real point of the new category, is for posts describing my experiences of being me: a queer, transgender woman living in Britain. But it’s not a memoir. It’s not a coherent story with a beginning, a middle, and I definitely hope not an end for a very long time. It’s for, rather, moments in my life, moments of joy and sadness, moments coloured by my own life experience.

For a long time, “memoir” has been the default form in which British trans women express themselves. It all probably started with Jan Morris, who wrote and published Conundrum in the mid-1970s shortly after having her GRS operation in North Africa. Since then there have been so many other “trans memoirs” that it is almost required for any writers who want to discuss trans rights, trans issues: you have to start by talking about your own experience, almost to prove your right to talk about the topic.* This mode was specifically called out by Shon Faye in her book The Transgender Issue: An Argument For Justice, which I suggest you go and read if you want to find out more about the treatment of trans people in general in this country.

This is not my mode either. This is a blog, after all, and I am not going to embark on any sort of book-length project in its pages.** For many years, I didn’t even mention that I was trans in any of my posts. My experiences as a trans person, though, were deeply but silently embedded in it, right back to one of the very first posts, about the court ruling Goodwin vs the UK, 22 years ago, which—although we didn’t realise it at the time—set up the entire legal framework for trans lives in Europe today. Put simply, the basic principle of the Goodwin ruling is that when trans people transition, they must be able to entirely expunge their former name from the record. It’s why my university was willing to send me a new degree certificate with the right name on, why there is a special secret process for DBS-checking a trans person, and partly why trans people have their NHS number changed on transition—something not even many people who work in the NHS are aware of.

I’ve already mentioned that, when I sat down to write about the death of The Mother in the same way I covered the death of my father, I simply couldn’t write about it in the same way without explaining first that I am trans. I transitioned “properly and for keeps” in between the two, and so many aspects of the experience were tied up with being a trans person that I felt I needed to “come out” to you all first. And that—inevitably, I suppose—has unlocked the floodgates, has left me comfortable writing about other aspects of being trans, other aspects of my transition, things about my life that I’d like to tell you, and things that I’d like to set down in my own canonical form before the memory fades any further. It will be helpful to you, possibly, if they are all filed in one place, even if that place itself is a haphazard mishmash in a random order

Hopefully, this is a useful explanation, not that I really needed to give you one. I’ve been thinking more about navigation, too, because the navigation of the site is tied very much to the blogging styles of twenty years ago, with every post being categorised, every post having keyword tags. I’m working through a few ideas for helping readers follow threads, follow individual projects, without needing to manually insert links between them. I’m not sure where that idea is going to go. This new category, though, is a start.

* I’m not going to name the well-known trans journalist who has been known to give her partners a signed copy of her own memoir as a present.

** Until I do get around to writing Caitlin Teaches You How To Code

Keyword noise: blogging, trans, transgender.

This year, I’ve tried to hold myself to posting at least one post per month on this site. I’ve mostly, but not quite, managed it. Nevertheless, there have still been so few that at present, with ten posts on the home page, if you scroll down to the bottom you’ve gone back almost a year. The bottom post on the home page right now is this one from last August, about my summer holiday to Hastings.

Exactly a year later, the week before the August bank holiday weekend, I’ve just been to Hastings again.

The Children are quite fond of repetition. It’s a form of comfort, I suppose. Their first choice for a summer holiday this year was: can we go back to the same place again please? I can understand it: as I said before, I went to Hastings on holiday myself pretty much every year between the ages of 3 and 13. But also: it’s a nice-sized place. It’s a small town, but it’s still got plenty of things to do, it’s got things they can enjoy doing over and over again, and it’s within reach of cities like Brighton or London if you do want a day out somewhere bigger. This year, we had a day out to Brighton, we had a day out to Pevensey Castle, but aside from that we just hung out in the town, going in the sea or poking in all the little shops. I was quite pleased I managed, once we’d arrived, to have a no-driving-at-all holiday.

Naturally, as we were staying within walking distance of the seafront, as soon as we had unloaded the car we wandered down and discovered it was the Bottle Alley Art Market. The Child Who Likes Animals was able to buy his first pieces of original art, an exciting moment, at least for his mums. It set the seal, though, on the idea that this was a good place to come because it is “our sort of place”, the sort of town where you do just come across random art but that is also welcoming and friendly to all visitors, not “artistic” in a snobbish or exclusive way.

I’m still getting used to using my “new” camera, that I’ve had for over a year now: because of that, my holiday photos are all a bit patchy. It doesn’t have a viewfinder, just a rear panel; so taking photos in bright daylight, it can be very hard to be confident I am actually framing my shot properly, never mind getting the exposure or the focus right. It does, however, slip nicely into my big handbag, so I’m wary of buying a larger model. The main thing may well just be practising more. In the meantime, some of the photos, at least, have come out tolerably well enough to post online.

The children are quite fond of repetition, so we may well end up going back to Hastings again next year. They were both frightened and intrigued, though, by one aspect of family history I revealed to them. After touring the exhibition about Sussex and Kent smugglers in Hastings’ caves, high in the cliffs above the beach, they were somewhat scared to hear that their own Georgian ancestors were wreckers and smugglers—not from Sussex, but from Cornwall. I can see us having to go to Cornwall for a holiday now, just so they can see where their distant relatives came from.

Keyword noise: holidays, Sussex, Hastings, St Leonards, Brighton, The Children, railway, miniature railway, Bottle Alley, Volks Electric Railway.

Since the Great Pandemic, our lives have changed so much. Being forced to leave the office, we realised that to a great extent we didn’t need to be in offices. Our jobs didn’t even need to be near home, at all, except when we still needed to visit the office for meetings or when we had something to say face-to-face. That’s why I found myself, at 5am on a very dark morning after lockdown had ended, getting in the car to drive from Lincolnshire down to The South. A straightforward four-hour journey, at the most. Within five minutes of setting off, though, it had started to snow. Gently at first, but getting thicker. Within ten minutes, I reached a hill where the car’s wheels just spun to a halt on the fresh, wet snow beneath them. I paused, let my heart stop racing, and gently tried to turn the car round. This office trip had to be made. It was the last day in March, but the date was purely coincidence.

This is not a memoir, at least, not a coherent one. It is a series of little vignettes, memories, a palimpsest of moments which have made me the woman I am today. This is not even the most significant one. It is something, though, that is officially supposed to be considered significant.

Being transgender is not, itself, a medical issue. It’s just who you are, something you have to live with, like poor eyesight. Getting things to help you live with it, though, can be a medical issue. If you have poor eyesight, you can change your lifestyle by changing all your books to large print and increasing the font size on your devices; or you can turn to more medical solutions, have the defects in your eyes objectively measured, get yourself glasses or surgery. If you’re trans, nobody can stop you changing your wardrobe or changing your name, but you need to turn to medicine to start making significant changes to your body to mould it into the right sort of shape. In some countries, a friendly GP will prescribe you hormones as long as they are sure you understand the consequences. In the UK, you can only get a hormone prescription after you’ve had a psychological diagnosis of “gender incongruence”, and in order to get that diagnosis, you have to go through various stages, all of them essentially compulsory. It used to be called the “Real Life Test”, the idea being you have to demonstrate, conclusively, that you are trans in order for doctors to help you, because they have no better diagnostic tool available.

One of the key steps, in all this, is making sure that all the people around you know who you really are. That includes coming out and being your true self in the workplace. Understandably, for many people, that’s one of the most stressful parts. After all, you don’t necessarily get on well with the place where you work, and you often can’t exactly control who you work with.

So, to fit in with the plan, to step along the programme, this is what I had to do.

What I am about to say is not true in detail, only in the broad general sense, but coming out becomes easier the more you do it. The first time feels like it is impossible. The more people you tell, each time becomes slightly easier. Even so, it was still difficult, by the time I reached the point of telling work, to ping the head of HR and tell her I needed a chat. It was a fairly small organisation, everyone knew each other, but nevertheless. The important thing, I knew beforehand, was the phrasing. No “I think I am…”, no “I would like”. No. I used firm, bold, positive statements. “I am transgender. I am transitioning. I’d like us to agree on how we tell the rest of the business this. What do you suggest?”

And, as I had expected, she was entirely lovely about it.

We agreed our plan of action. We would tell my manager. He would tell the rest of senior management. As for the rest…at our quarterly all-hands face-to-face meeting, I would tell people in person. So that’s why I had to make it to the office that day, despite the unexpected snow. I couldn’t go back. I couldn’t even look like I was going back. The announcement had to be made.

By this time all my old masculine clothes were already out of the wardrobe, and androgyny was in. I’d been painting my nails for a few months. I wondered how obvious it was; I wondered how many of them might have guessed. Probably none. As it happened, just one person had, or said they had, because they’d spotted my nail polish. They hadn’t spotted all the other hints I’d slowly dropped.

In the end, it was all something of an anticlimax, and everyone else was also absolutely lovely—which is entirely as it should be. We had various meetings set up, with various groups of people, all set up for the purpose of being able to say “oh yes, there’s something else [deadname] wanted to tell you.” Most people were barely bothered, aside from a few kind women who made a point of immediately striking up conversation with me about femme things, doing their best to make me feel included. And from then—that was that. Within a few days, my deadname had ben wiped from the systems.

Why am I writing this? In part, because it seemed like such a big step beforehand, and seems like such a tiny thing in hindsight. In part, also, because the rest of the world seems to place such a large emphasis on it being a major step in your transition journey. For me, though, it seems awfully irrelevant in hindsight. An event that was more important to everyone around me than to me myself. There are many more stages in my transition that mattered much, much more. Maybe that’s why I’m starting with this. Starting with the unimportant first.

Keyword noise: trans, transgender, transition, work.

There are still numerous craft projects somewhere in mid-flight at Symbolic Towers, and I keep slowly gathering plans for more that I haven’t even started yet. I have enough crochet patterns to keep me crocheting for several years, probably; a very large cross-stitch under way, and several other cross-stitch kits ready to start—and that’s to say nothing of the Lego or the model train kits. None of these things, really, have been posted on here, largely because I think “I’ll save them for YouTube” and then never video them either.

Despite all that, I’ve just started yet another cross stitch project!

What’s exciting about this project, the reason why it’s using up most of my crafting energy at the moment, is that: for the first time, this isn’t a kit. It’s not even a pattern I’ve bought and then found my own materials for, like most of the crochet projects. No, for the first time, this is a pattern I created myself. I saw something I thought would make a good cross stitch project, turned it (with the help of software) into a chart, and got started.

Because this isn’t something that was designed specifically for cross stitch by a specialist cross stitch designer, it does use quite a lot of colours, and it’s going to be a bit more complex than pretty much all of the cross stitch kits I’ve tried so far. Because of that, for the first time, I’ve actually started crossing off each of the stitches on the pattern as I do it—it helps that I know I can always print another copy off, of course. It is definitely going to help the further into this I get, though, especially when I get to the parts of the design which include lots of small areas of different colours, or the parts with lots of confetti—the cross stitch term for single isolated stitches scattered one-at-a-time across the background. This project will have a lot of confetti.

It will be some months before the whole thing is finished, even though it’s not full coverage, and even if I did deliberately avoid including any backstitch as part of the design. For now, though, new project energy is carrying me bowling along at pace. Only a week in, and already I’ve done a good chunk of the pattern’s central, focal point.

That’s quite a good chunk of stitching for one week’s spare evening moments. What is it, you ask? Well, to know that…if you don’t recognise it, you’ll just have to wait and find out.

To read the next post about this project, follow this link

Keyword noise: crafting, sewing, cross-stitch, current projects.

It’s over eighteen months now since The Mother died, and I’ve barely even talked about it here, aside from one piece I wrote about burying her. There are a whole heap of reasons for that. For one thing, the posting rate here has slowed down to one post a month if that, due to all the various other things making demands on my time. For another, a whole heap of the experiences I had around my mother’s deah pivot on it being, when it happened, less than a year into my gender transition. As I wasn’t open about being transgender on this site until this March, I could hardly recount a lot of the things that happened, from the excited curiosity of the funeral arranger, to the cold stares some of my mother’s friends gave me as I walked into the church behind the coffin.

Some of this, though, is down to how I feel about the death. I don’t feel grief at the death of my parents. Rather, I feel anger, a low, slow-bubbling anger that they let me down in life. And that is all rolled up in my gender too, to some extent.

My parents never supported me. Financially, yes; emotionally, no. I came out to my parents as trans when I was in my early 20s, and they were universally unsupportive about it. My mother cried. Prayed. Said I should start going to church, or take up a new hobby like playing bass guitar, and that would take my mind off the idea. When I started to seek medical support, she kept telling me I didn’t have to go through with anything, at every turn.

So when I decided to stop putting my life on hold, when I decided twenty years later that yes, I needed to transition, that I would never be myself if I did not: I also decided I wasn’t going to tell her. After all, I’d already come out to her once. She didn’t deserve to put me through that a second time. I came out to everyone else; I started wearing nail polish; I changed my whole wardrobe. I did it all right in front of her, and just let her watch and work it out for herself this time.

She died about ten or eleven months into that process.

By the time she died, she knew my name, even though she always claimed she had forgotten it. She even used the right pronouns for me, some of the time. When I am still sorting out her belongings, cursing the state she let things get into, I am also always, in the background, angry that none of that happened until the last few months of her life, until she knew she was on her own apart from me. I wish I’d had the strength and the bravery to cut both of my parents out of my life, and find my own way forward. It would have been very different.

This all sounds quite bitter and nasty, but I’m posting this now because this is June, this is Pride Month, this is the month that for queer people, is supposed to be all parties and parades and excitement. I’m proud of who I am every month of the year though, which is why I’ll always still be angry at the way my parents treated me when I needed them. I wish my mother could see me now, so she could see just how much I’ve changed since she died, and see just what I missed when I was younger.

Eventually, I will write down all those stories, about the dark comedy of the Accident and Emergency ward where half the staff couldn’t get through the doors, and about lying on a bed, half asleep, listening out for the ambulance I had asked for three or four hours before. I’ll have lots of other stories to tell, too, all those fragments and pieces by which I realised I was transgender and started trying to do something about that. Those are important stories. They’re not just for June.

Keyword noise: death, The Mother, queer, trans, transgender, transition, Pride.

Back in March, I wrote about making my post publishing process on this blog a bit simpler. Well; that was really just a side effect. The main point of that post, and the process behind it, was to find a simple and cheap way to move this site onto HTTPS-based hosting, which I accomplished with an Azure Static Web App. The side effect was that the official way to deploy an Azure Static Web App is via Microsoft Oryx, run from a GitHub Action. So now, when I write a new post, I have a fairly ordinary workflow similar to what I’d use (and do use!) in a multi-developer team. I create my changes in a Git branch, create a GitHub pull request, merge that pull request, and the act of doing a merge kicks off a GitHub Action pipeline that fires up Oryx, runs Wintersmith, and produces a site image which Oryx then uploads to Azure. Don’t be scared of all the different names of all the steps: for me, it’s just a couple of buttons that sets off a whole Heath Robinson chain of events. If I was doing this in a multi-person team, the only real difference would be to get someone else to review the change before I merge it, just to make sure I haven’t said something completely stupid.

You, on the other hand, are getting me unfiltered.

I mentioned in that previous post that Oryx would often give me a very vague Failure during content distribution error if the content distribution step—the step that actually uploads the finished site to Azure—hit a five-minute timeout. I tried to address this, at least partially, by cutting the size and number of the tag pages; and it did address it, partially. Not all of the time though. After an evening of trying to deploy a new post for an hour or so, hitting the timeout each time and trying again, I decided I had to come up with a better approach. What I came up with, again, has another rather nice side effect.

A little bit of digging around what other people facing the Failure during content distribution error had written, unearthed a useful tidbit of info. That timeout doesn’t just happen when the site is large in size. It also is more likely to happen when an upload contains a lot of changes.

Now, every page on this site has a whole bunch of menus. If you’re on desktop, they’re over to your right; if you’re on mobile, they’re down at the bottom of the page somewhere. There’s articles filed by category and articles filed by date. There’s the cloud of all the tags I’ve used the most, and there’s links to other sites—I really should give that a refresh. Those blocks are on every page. The ones which link to other pages include a count of articles in that category or month, so you know what you’re letting yourself in for. The tag cloud’s contents shift about occasionally, depending on what I’ve written. The end result is that, when I was adding a new post to the site, every single page already on the blog had to be rewritten. For example, this is the first (and only) post from May 2024, so every single page already on the site (all 4,706 of them), had to be rewritten to add a “May 2024 (1)” line at the top of the “Previously…” section. That’s about 84% of the files on the blog, changing, to add one new post.

However…it doesn’t have to be like that.

The whole site doesn’t have to be completely static. It can still remain server-side static, if you’re willing to rely on a bit of client-side JavaScript; most people, the vast majority of people, have JavaScript available. Instead of including those menus in every page, I thought, why not render those menus once, and have a wee piece of JavaScript on each page that pulls in those blocks on demand?

It wasn’t that hard to do. Rendering the files just needed me to pull those blocks out of the main layout template and into their own files. The JavaScript code to load them is all of 11 lines long, and that’s if you write it neatly; it really just initiates a HTTP GET call and when the results come back, inserts them onto the right place on the page. There’s a sensible fallback option that lets you click through to a truly-static version of each menu, just in case you’re having problems—those largely already existed, but weren’t really being used. Now, adding one new post needs, at the moment, just over a hundred files to change. Most of those are the hundred-ish files that make up the “main sequence” of posts, as when you add one at the top, another drops off the bottom and on to the next page, and so on all the way down. There are also the affected category and month pages. Even so, you’re going from changing ~84% of the pages on the site, to changing somewhere around 2-5%. That’s a massive difference. It also reduces the size of the site quite a lot too: those menus are over 12kb of code, all together. Not very much by modern standards, just once; but repeated on every page of the site, that was using up about 58Mb of space which has now been clawed back.

Naturally, the first deployment of the new system took a few goes to work, because it was still changing every page on the site. Since, though, deployments have gone completely smoothly, and the problem hasn’t come back once. Hopefully, things will stay that way.

This isn’t the only improvement I’ve been working on, by the way. There is, upcoming, another big change to how the site is published. It isn’t quite ready to go live yet, though. I’ll be blogging about it when it reaches production, when I find enough free time to get it finished. It’s something I’m really pleased with, even though if I didn’t tell you, you wouldn’t actually notice a thing. You’ll just have to wait for the next meta-blog post about engineering on the site, to find out what I’m working on.

Keyword noise: Azure, Azure Static Web Apps, blogging, Caitlin lectures you, computing, devops, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Oryx, programming, static hosting, static websites, web hosting, weebsites, Wintersmith.

One stereotypical nerd gadget I’ve never seen the point of, that I always assumed was the nerd equivalent of hand-woven gold hi fi cables, was the mechanical keyboard. I assumed they were, as the phrase goes, fidget spinners for IT geeks. Something that is expensive and makes lots of fun clicky-clacky noises, but doesn’t actually change your computing experience by one tiny bit.

Well, reader, I was wrong. I admit it. Completely, absolutely, 100 per cent wrong. Switching to a mechanical keyboard has been one of the best productivity improvements I could have made to my workplace. Since I started using one, my typing has speeded up enormously. It’s definitely not just a toy. Having a decent length of travel on each key movement somehow genuinely makes it much easier and quicker for me to type; and also makes my typing a lot more confident. I’ve never learned to type properly, and I still make a lot of mistakes, but in general I’m finding my fingers skip across the keys much more freely.

This first started last summer when I was already tempted by the idea, and saw that a fairly cheap model already had been reduced quite a lot on sale. So, I bought it. And, if nothing else, it was pretty. It glowed, with rainbow light. It came with a choice of beige or purple keycaps, so being contrary I naturally changed just half of them over, trying to get a dithering kind of effect from beige on the left to purple on the right. It kind of worked. Typing, though, was excellent.

I felt like I was typing much better than I ever had on laptop keyboards, but there was something wrong. Still, I resisted the temptation to be a keyboard nerd. An enthusiast. One keyboard would be enough for me.

The problem with the first keyboard was that it was only a 60% model. In other words, it only has about 60% of the keys of a “full” PC keyboard; just the core letters and numbers really. To get all the other functions, you need a modifier key. A lot of laptops do that to access extra functions or squeeze all of the keys into a laptop case, but this was using it for fairly basic functionality like the four cursor keys. When coding, I find myself moving around with them a lot, so having to chord to use them quickly became annoying. On top of that there were other little problems: the Bluetooth connection would sometimes glitch out, particularly if the battery was low. When the battery ran low the only warning was one of the modifier keys flashing, and then when you charged it up there was no sign of how charged it was. On the good side, its small size made it nice and portable. Overall, it was a good starter.

After a few months, I’d decided it was time to think about buying a full-size mechanical keyboard. And why not go all in and just buy a “barebones” model. A barebones keyboard is, well, not really a keyboard at all. It’s the core of a keyboard, but it doesn’t have any keys. You have to fit it out with keyswitches and keycaps for it to work. When it arrived, it was very nicely-packaged, it felt very substantial, solid and heavy, but I couldn’t actually start using it.

It’s a Keychron K10 model, and all you have to do to get it working is push switches into each of those sockets. You get to choose the brand of keyswitch you want, though, and switch manufacturers publish complex charts of the response and movement of different types of switch, describing them as “soft”, “firm”, “clicky” and so on. I just went for a fairly soft switch from a well-known brand, and set to work plugging them all in. It was quite a therapeutic job, pushing each switch home until it is firmly in place.

The harder part is choosing the keycaps: harder, because as well as how they feel, they have to look pretty too, and there are an innumerable assortment of manufacturers who will sell you pretty keys. And in the end, I just couldn’t decide, so went with a set of plain black “pudding” keycaps. “Pudding” keycaps have a solid, opaque top but translucent sides, so the backlights on each key shine nicely through. I’m not sure they are the right keycaps for me long-term, but they were a nice and cheap “first set”.

Am I going to turn into a keyboard nerd? Well, I’ve already tweaked it a wee bit. I kept hitting the “Insert” key by accident, not being used to having a key there, so I’ve already changed the switch on that specific key to be a much firmer, clickier one, so that at least when I do hit it by accident I notice I’ve done it. I’ll probably change the keycaps for something prettier at some point, something a bit more distinctive. I’m not going to go out and buy a lot more keyboards, because I already think this one is very nice to type on. It has a sensible, useful power lamp that flashes when the battery’s low, is red when it’s charging and goes green when it’s finished. But, overall: I admit I was wrong. This is much, much nicer to type on—I’m writing this post on it now—than a standard laptop keyboard is. For something I’ll use pretty much every day that I’m at home, it’s definitely worth the money.

Keyword noise: keyboards, mechanical keyboards.