Believe it or not, the name 'extra bits' came to me in a dream. I can't remember what I ate for dinner that evening, but in my dream I started two tech news sites called 'extra bits' and 'tech rub' 💩

Early in my career I voraciously devoured the C2 Wiki - the original Wiki created by Ward Cunningham. Giants in the field like Kent Beck, Ron Jeffries, Martin Fowler, and Ward himself would create and comment on articles about programming topics. It was pretty awesome to glean wisdom from these incredible practicioners of my craft. Every day at lunch I learned topics like Code Smells, YAGNI, Do the Simplest Thing that could Possibly Work, and so on. Any good programming habit I have today I credit to this incredible site. I also learned about Python and Ruby, which helped break me out of the Microsoft bubble ☠️

Later on I discovered Ars Technica, which had some incredible writers and covered more than just programming topics. Nowdays I get my tech news from Hacker News and TL;DR, but I digress.

Anyway, I thought, "I like tech news; I'll create my own site and I'll call it 'Extrabits'!" 😂 I was learning Rust at the time, so I started building it with Rocket. Later on I experimented with Yew and Dioxus. I couldn't get Dioxus working properly but was able to get Yew working fairly easily. At this point I abandonded tech news and made into this blog you're reading now. Later, I moved the content into my Nostr relay, because Nostr is awesome, and why not?

Which takes us to today. The site is now built with Zola, which I discovered while working on a client project. Zola is awesome - fast and easy to setup; but it still makes me feel like I'm doing a bit of programming, as opposed to other CMS's out there like Wordpress, et all. Extrabits is now the name of my business as well. Check out what I do here. Maybe some day I'll create "Tech Rub - Zesty Tech News" or "Tech Rub - Finger-Licking Good News" or something 🫥 Stay tuned.

Cheers!