Six Years of 0x32 (Where Did the Time Go?)
The first post on this blog went up on the 8th of August 2020, two sentences long:
Welcome to my new blog 0x32 started as I reach the age of 50.
That was six years ago. I genuinely had to check the git log twice, because it doesn’t feel like six years — it feels like I set this thing up a couple of years back at most. Where did the time go.
Turns out it went into 164 posts and well over 250 commits, but not at all evenly. Here’s every month of it:
The launch-month spike, four years of a decent drumbeat, two enormous Inktober-fuelled Octobers, then a near-total flatline through 2024 and most of 2025. I don’t have a dramatic reason for the flatline — life got busier, the blog quietly stopped being the thing I reached for, and once a gap opens up it’s easy to let it stay open. No hiatus announcement, just months of near-nothing, stacking up quietly in the background without me really clocking it in real time. That’s the “where did the time go” of it in one picture.
What’s brought it back this year is partly having new things worth writing about — a 3D printer, some AI-assisted coding sessions, generative art scripts — and partly just deciding to treat the blog itself as a small project worth tending again rather than a finished thing sitting untouched.
Looking back over the categories, the split is telling too:
- Creative — 85 posts, by far the biggest bucket: photos, drawings, Inktober entries, generative art.
- Technical — 14, plus a scatter of Geek/Python/RaspberryPi tags.
- Retro — 8, old hardware and software nostalgia.
I set this up expecting a tech blog and it turned into mostly a creative one, which in hindsight tracks — the tech posts are the ones I can write, the creative ones are the ones I actually want to.
The other thing that’s been fun, separate from the writing itself, is that the blog has been its own small ongoing project to tinker with. It started on Travis CI; that’s long gone. The theme’s been swapped, custom shortcodes added for embedding Flickr photos and LBRY videos, a proper multi-target deploy pipeline built out (S3 + CloudFront as the primary site, a GitHub Pages mirror as backup), and — very recently — a proper cleanup pass to fix rot that had quietly built up: broken links, a missing favicon, no analytics at all until GoatCounter got wired in a couple of weeks ago. None of that is content, exactly, but it’s been just as satisfying as writing the posts — maybe more, some months.
I won’t pretend I wouldn’t like more people to stumble across it — the GoatCounter numbers make it pretty clear this is a small, quiet corner of the internet, and part of me wishes it were better visited. But if even a handful of the people who have landed here got some actual use out of a post, or just a few minutes of entertainment out of the Inktober scribbles or a fractal render, that’s plenty of reason to have kept going.
Six years, a five-figure number of commits away from being embarrassing, and a blog that’s gone quiet and loud again a couple of times over. Here’s to whatever the next six look like — hopefully with fewer multi-year gaps, but no promises.