About Me
Hi there, I'm Mark! I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts with my wife and our son. I made this site to play with the web and to provide myself with easy access to useful resources.
Professionally, I consult with software engineering teams to solve problems in their product development pipelines by improving their culture, technology, and processes. Let's connect if you lead or work in a software engineering team facing issues like unpredictable timelines, poor quality, disorganized planning, or communication friction—I'd love to learn more and see how I can help.
Personally, I'm very interested in crafting tools that make life easier, healthier, and more fun. Some of those tools are available on this site (like a Digital Weather Graph and Celestial Positions Calculator), but most are on my private web application (like a Habit Tracker, Recurring Work Manager, Listening Practice Trainer for Language Learning, Voice Integrator, and more). I hope to someday document my work here.
I enjoy meeting new people and am always interested to learn about others' passions and experiences. Feel free to send me an email—I'd love to connect![1] And if you're in the Cambridge area I'm always open to meeting up for a walk or bike ride or coffee.
About the Website
Over a period of 10+ years I created thousands of pages of content in Google Docs to explore ideas and organize my projects, but I always felt limited: sharing content meant sharing Google's branding and their bulky interface, I often resorted to using tables to create the visuals I wanted, there was no easy way to create interactivity, and on and on.
But Google Docs was always the easiest, most familiar, and most accessible choice. I always dreamt of creating my own website, but I didn't get around to it until my son was a newborn and I needed a creative outlet while wearing him in a carrier as he napped. Thus, the site was born.
I enjoy using HTML, CSS, and Javascript as tools for creative expression, and I'm very much in favor of the subset of the internet that is fun, playful, creative, personal, and expressive.
Visual Design
The design of the site evokes the pages of a dotted grid notebook that I carry around.[2] I tend to write a heading on each page and underline it with a ruler, hence the headings with lines underneath them.
The site uses the D-DIN font for headings, which is a digital version of the DIN 1451 typeface. The body text is in Arial.
Technical Design
The site is served from a Node.js server written in Typescript that uses Express as the web framework and EJS for templating. Most pages don't use clientside Javascript, but the ones that do are written in Typescript and are bundled using Webpack. The site is hosted on the cheapest Heroku tier ($7 per month) and uses Cloudflare's cache ($0 per month) so that it can handle arbitrarily heavy traffic.
Footnotes
[2] The MUJI Passport Memo.