“Things are the way they are because they got that way.”
From The Secrets of Consulting by Gerald Weinberg, via The Crux
This saying is meant to encapsulate the idea of path dependency, and that people usually aren’t idiots on purpose. There are always exceptions, of course, but generally people had reasons for why certain decisions were made. They may not have been good reasons, in hindsight, but they did exist. Finding out those reasons before passing judgement is often a good idea.
© 1984 - 2025 Adrian Tritschler
There’s not much more I can add to who I am.
Vanity site? Technology experiment? Learning tool? Blog? Journal? Diary? Photo album? I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you…
I experiment. I play. I write and I take pictures. Some of the site is organised around topics, other parts are organized by date, then there’s always the cross-references between them.
Its all been here a fairly long time. Like the papers on my desk, or the books on the bedside table, the pile just grew… and it all grew without much plan or structure. I try not to break URLs, so historical oddities abound.
Long ago it started as a learning experiment with a few static HTML pages, then I added a bit of server-side includes and some very ugly PHP. A hand-built journal/blog on top of that PHP, then a few experiments in moving to various static publishing systems. I’ve never wanted a database-based blogging engine, so over the years I’ve tried PHP, nanoblogger, emacs-muse, silkpage and docbook before settling on Emacs Org mode for writing and jekyll for publishing. But the itch remained… I never really liked jekyll and the ruby underneath always seemed so much black magic. So now the latest incarnation is Org mode and hugo.