And so I begin...
After many years away from publishing online, I’m setting up this space to begin writing again — not only to reflect on what’s changed in my life, but on the deep changes happening all around us.
I’m excited to begin blogging here: this is a platform for cultivating and ushering in a new chapter for both myself, and for the reality we are cocreating. I can’t minimize the impact AI has been having on my own self-understanding, yet I’m also exploring the limits and boundaries.
My own unique voice comes from experience with trauma healing, psychedelic exploration (hundreds of ayahuasca ceremonies, in particular), embodiment practices, my own relational and sensory sensitivities, and an artistic/musical side.
I’ve had this domain name (pltfrm.com) since perhaps 2004— I registered it with the vague thought that I could create a business, here. Back then, I was at my first job out of college, doing database design with Microsoft Access, and data analysis, at a boutique financial company. I’d been doodling since I was a kid, doing desktop publishing, curating fonts, dabbling with 3-D modeling: I appreciated how it was such an art form to create good user interfaces in the way that MS Access facilitated: the ability to design a full-fledged user application from the ground up, with buttons, fields, dropdown controls — all backed by SQL databases. Access seemed far ahead of its time: a codeless tool, essentially, for creating functional UIs: that really appealed to the artistic side of me which loved to tweak control positions, table schemas, etc. I eventually learned to drop into Visual Basic (VBA) for certain control hookups, to use pass-through queries and to generate dynamic SQL, to connect Access as a front-end to a high performance / reliability-centered backend workhorse like MySQL…
I’m stepping back into the past in talking about this, but I’m wanting to describe the place I was when I bought pltfrm.com. My idea at the time, during these early Internet days, was to build “Access for the Web”— having used various toolkits for building Web pages, I was frustrated by the need to learn new coding frameworks, write repetitive CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update, Delete) code, and so on. (Stuff like Ruby on Rails automates this, but you still gotta learn a new framework, and you still need a UI layer. And why Ruby? (I’m sure there’s a great answer.) Everything seemed so clunky by comparison… MS Access truly was ahead of its time. Every once in a while I’d go looking for what I was imagining, which would have had both the simplicity, elegance, and power I was used to on the desktop, but whatever Web product I tried wasn’t quite it… Eventually we got modern products like AirTable (which I haven’t explored much), and Notion… which kind of tries to do what Access did, but lacks forms, which are the basis of application design. There are business solutions like Caspio which I tried, but I just couldn’t get into it.
Well before all of these, I’d vaguely dreamed I might build a sort of “Access for the Web” at pltfrm.com. I didn’t get very far… The idea was born from my general tendency to question existing systems and ways of doing things. As one of my brothers long ago pointed out, with respect to the board games and card games we’d played in my family, I’d learn a game and then very quickly want to experiment with what would happen if we changed the rules…
And lo and behold, this journey picks up, in an unexpected and brilliant way. It’s 2025; if I were interested in databases, I’d dive deeper into AirTable… there are probably many more competitors. I might try Caspio again. I figure those are solved problems. (Update: maybe not!) I thought I’d moved on from the tech space. And yet, that something new on the horizon that’s emerged front and center now is AI. It’s responsible for both helping me build out the simple stack behind this site, which was fun (Obsidian for writing and maintaining entries using markdown; Astro as a static site generator; GitHub actions to automatically build the content and publish it with free hosting by GitHub Pages: you’ll notice that it’s blazing fast!), and the mind expanding conversations that are helping me synthesize and share some of the richness of the life experiences and curiosities I’ve had in between my tech career, and the path that’s emerging now.
Actually, the reason I’m writing this is because I’m excited about the tech stack I got together, and just wanted to test it: write something, save, push, and boom, it’s built and online. So I’m going to do that, and for now: to be continued.