Skip it and here’s what happens. A trapped air bubble expands in the kiln and blows your pot apart, sometimes taking the neighbors’ pots with it. Uneven clay won’t center, and clay that won’t center can’t be thrown. The whole thing is decided before you’ve done the part most folks would call pottery.

I had a lesson recently where I couldn’t pull my walls up — they kept going lopsided and thin in the wrong places. I figured it was my hands. My mentor watched for about ten seconds and traced it all the way back to my centering. The walls were never the problem, my prep was.

I think about this constantly at work now.

Start with the data model. Get the shape right and features practically fall out for free — the structure already saw them coming. Get it wrong and you spend the project writing adapters to apologize for a decision you made before you understood the problem. The clay was uneven. The walls pull crooked no matter how good your hands are.

Same with the names I pick on day one — they outlive everything. processData becomes a junk drawer. My utils folder is still load-bearing three years later and nobody dares touch it. None of this hurts immediately. It waits until the code is spinning fast, then throws it off-center.

And same with all the boring setup. Linting, types, a test suite that runs fast and stays green. It ships to nobody, and it decides whether the next thousand commits are pleasant or a slog.

No user has ever seen my data model. Most of my coworkers won’t either. The people who notice this work are the other practitioners — the ones who’ve been throwing long enough to watch ten seconds of wobble and tell you it started at the bottom. The masters can see your wedging in your walls.

So wedge your clay.

So I dragged it up to 24.04 — in place, without taking the site down. Five LTS releases, MySQL 8, PHP 8.3, WordPress 7, all in one very long evening.

The fun part was finding out what’s been quietly running on here for a decade: a Mumble server, an Icecast stream, a Squid proxy, an OpenVPN server with certs from 2013, and a Java 6 install from 2010. Hello, old friends. And goodbye.

The less fun part was the box refusing to boot at all for a while — turns out Xen won’t load a modern compressed kernel — and a leftover package from 2016 deleting the database’s log directory right out from under it. Both survivable, because the very first thing I did was take backups. Always take the backups.

Anyway. It’s 2026 in here now. There’s even an AI bingo board.

Thanks washyourlyrics.com!

Congrats to all my coworkers and friends on making it to WordPress 5.0 release day!

and

This is a first post using the new Gutenberg editor in WordPress. 

Recently frozen lake ice has some interesting properties: it looks completely black and makes some interesting sounds when you skate over it. Swedish mathematician MÃ¥rten Ajne is a black ice skating enthusiast and he demonstrates his technique in this National Geographic video. Youâ€ll want to turn up the sound or use headphones…

via The wonderful sounds of black ice skating — kottke.org

We could be excused for thinking that Micro.blog is like App.net — a Twitter alternative greeted with enthusiasm but that eventually closed. Itâ€s not the same thing, though, and Iâ€ll explain why. Micro.blog is not an alternative silo: instead, itâ€s what you build when you believe that the web itself is the great social network.

– from Why Micro.blog is Not Another App.net @ inessential.com

I’m adding the Webmention plugin here to see how it flies.

I’m blowery on micro.blog.