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Download lisp to my brain is dated 19 July 2009. That's my first post on Hacker News the day I joined nearly seventeen years ago with a goal of learning to program.

The oldest date I can find on this blog is 23 March 2019. It's been taken offline periodically as I stumble my way forward in life as best I can. I still don't really know how to program.

Standard programmer wisdom is if you want to learn to code, have a project.

I've long wanted my own clothing line and some recent posts here are tagged NovemberWestWears, same as the name of the blog where I am developing those business ideas for a clothing line: November West Wears. The pieces here are the tech part of what is intended to be an online only store for made-to-measure business casual knitwear.

In the course of doing this site, I learned that I already have some coding essentials because I'm a longtime blogger who learned HTML and CSS via self study and I hand coded my sites before ultimately moving to blogger where HTML and CSS still come in handy without being a big burden, so I still code a little bit very regularly.

My research says I can probably do this project with HTML, CSS and XML. XML is a markup language but not the one used on Reddit which is Markdown. I've edited posts on Reddit using Markdown, so XML is probably something I can learn.

I've spent a lot of time on Hacker News and that has made me aware that folks who come up with a business idea and imagine they can hire programmers like a waitress to serve them up some slop code tend to fail.

If you want to do it right, do it yourself.



5 July 2026

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