Way later in my career as as (now proper) software engineer, I wanted to play with all the cool new Javascript framework that were coming out. Particularly I loved Static Site Generators (which was by no means a new or JS-specific concept) so I ended up picking Gatsby at the time. It allowed me to create a clean, fast and responsive website that centralized data from dozens of third party sources into a GraphQL API that all pages queried to be then rendered fully statically. It was a marvel of performance but also a pain to build and maintain especially as Gatsby got abandoned.
So I rewrote the website in NextJS which was a pain but allowed me to simplify greatly the whole stack and start decoupling from the framework into something more generic. I tried to stretch the new framework to do everything I wanted it to do, but ultimately I was trying to bend it to do hybrid static generation in a way it wasn’t meant to. So after months of fighting in the mud, and fighting performance issues that left me questioning my sanity, I pulled the trigger and planned a second major rewrite back to Laravel which is how the previous version worked. The refactor was a pain but once settled back into my comfort stack I was able to do way more significant changes and I decided to continue updating it with more cool things that aren’t just my content, to make it more my digital garden like I had originally envisioned, make it more of a website like we used to do them. Hopefully I’ll manage.
The name comes from my second album Out Through the Winter Throat , it’s an album that touches a lot about war and cataclysm, and its main title comes from humanity on the album being kicked out through the (nuclear) winter’s throat. Not disappeared, but swallowed in it. This is likely the most political version of my website, and it’s still miles away from how much I would want it to. But this image of us all gradually vanishing in our own doom stuck with me as I rewrote my website at a time where I myself was being swallowed by life.
