Introduction
Hello 👋 you can call me meadow. I'm really happy you're here.
I feel anonymity helps with creativity so forgive me if I don't share any details besides some basic stuff: he/him, 30.
I'm a software engineer by profession, and right now I'm part of a team exploring the use of LLMs to enrich real-time human interactions, especially in service scenarios.
Occasionally given to bouts of poetic nonsense, usually trying to capture some fleeting feeling or sensation. I write mainly about random thoughts, poetry, and for a while now I have also been trying to get myself into writing short stories.
As for my hobbies: I play the flute, writing, reading, learning languages, and make the occasional small game (more often than not with PICO-8). In general I like to tinker around with stuff. When I have the chance I like to walk around in nature.
I've always thought that knowing someone's favorite writers allows you to glimpse quite a bit about that person. Here are some of mine in no particular order: Terry Pratchett, Tolkien, Patrick Rothfuss, Brandon Sanderson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ray Bradbury, Robert Jordan.
I first heard of Bear on Hacker News quite some time ago and was immediately attracted by the whole idea and the concept of little web.
I've always wanted to have a blog, and at the time I had just created one on Substack, thinking that a polished, full-featured platform would help me towards my goal. I wrote some posts on there but soon started paying attention to all the social features, and their whole "make money while writing" thing. I eventually stopped writing altogether, mainly out of feeling of intimidation with the platform, feeling I wasn't doing what it wanted me to do. I was subconsciously forcing myself to write with a style and content that I thought would fit well.
After a while I decided to try out my hand at blogging once again, but this time I was going to create my own blog. I spent some time studying different options and at the end chose to use the Hugo site generator mainly because of its flexibility and community support.
I had a lot of fun building the actual site/web-app, but after some months of working on it I found myself with what amounted to be a clone of Substack. It looked exactly the same, and I was still forcing myself to write the same kind of content. I also probably spent more time tweaking stuff on the website than actually writing.
Something nice that both Substack and Bear have is a community, which is something that you don't get when creating your own site. On these platforms, even if nobody reads your stuff, it's nice to know that they're there if anyone wants to read them. I feel this is motivating, and offers some sense of accountability. But when writing on your own self-hosted blog it's virtually impossible for someone to find it unless you spend some time promoting yourself on social media, which I wasn't too keen on doing.
So here we are again on Bear, and this time I've actually decided to make a page, a fresh start on a platform that is so simple it doesn't get in the way but also doesn't force you in any way.
Anyway, its nice to meet you!