About

#updates

Colophon

Thanks for visiting. I'm Dave, lifelong geek, family man, and bearded since 2007. Professionally I work as a Technical Account Manager for Twilio. Personally (and informally at work) I'm also a Tech Evangelist / Advocate - I like showing people new technology and getting them excited about using it.

Off the top of my head

I've used dropcase as my online name since 2003.

Geek, family, beard, and more ways to show who I am. I am a person who enjoys technology, as well as being in nature.

I like bullet points, especially my own.

I like being able to connect - well, just about anything. People, ideas, systems, patterns, all of it.

Being a whole and healthy person takes a lot of work. Maybe I'll get there someday.

Frequently Asked Questions^f7a398

Q: What? Why would you share that? (you might think)
A: The thing is, one I don't expect that very many (if any at all) end up reading this. Secondly, I don't really care what your judgment is. I wanted to share and anyone who resonates with it will connect with it in their own way.

The Story

The Shorter Version

This is where I explain to you who I am, what I'm about, and some stuff about the way the site runs. I could also give you a (hopefully brief) history of the site to get us to present day.

Instead, I'll provide the elevator pitch version:

I started dropcase.com in May 2003 with the hope of building a site that people liked to visit and read as much as I enjoyed creating. It went through a bunch of iterations, including sitting idle for all too long. At one point my host disappeared off the Internet, so I've moved things to a more stable platform.

For any questions, comments, or advice, email me:

dl[at]dropcase[dot]com

The Longer Version

(a work in progress)

Two Thousand and Two (ish)

I was working at a large financial company doing Web-based technical support and started a site with some of the guys from my team. This was back in 2002, I was young and single and had disposable income. That's a good thing, since registering a domain back then was $35 a year and hosting a site for cheap came with fair warning. That site was a very tongue-in-cheek take on how we viewed ourselves - pimpgeek.com (we had a modicum of social skills). We threw something together for the four of us (go ahead and check the Wayback Machine) and it pretty much sat like that until we shut it down about a year later.

Even while that was up, I decided that I wanted to also have a site of my own. In late May of 2003, I registered dropcase.com and set up hosting on a site called NoMonthlyFees.com (a friend was hosting their band's site through them). It wasn't pretty, but it was mine.

The rundown of various ways I've managed content on the site include hand-coding (yikes), older-school CMS options like Greymatter (yay for cgi-bin), Drupal, Dokuwiki, Hexo, et al. Honestly I didn't have any direction for the site (arguably still don't) and wanted to build something of my own.

Two Thousand and Four

Less than a year later I left that large financial company and started at a small but growing company based in Waltham, Massachusetts (but headquartered in Sweden). There ended up being a lot of free time as the only IT person on-site a lot of the time, so I started using some of the things I learned in PHP and MySQL to start streamlining some of the processes used - and especially the Intranet we were on. It was manually coded using something that I wouldn't wish on anyone sane. You had to install an application to "load" the site in and make edits, which it would then publish for you.

Why, you may ask? It was because the person "in charge" of IT on-site at the time wasn't actually that technical and didn't know how to do web development.

[TODO]: fill in the missing 21 years (yikes)

Two Thousand and Twenty Five

Finally getting not only motivation, but a platform to use after trying out several. The biggest issue was friction of getting updates to "the right place" which usually meant my desktop.

Currently using Digital Garden - Publish Obsidian Notes For Free, which works great with my existing Obsidian workflow and setup. Paired with git and Vercel, it's clean and works as well as I need it to. Bonus, it works on mobile which some other SSG setups didn't handle the way I wanted.

The Technology Behind It

Here's what I'm using for this iteration (in alphabetical order, except for the last one):