Okay, let's, let's tackle those.

Right, right. Ah, I think it's almost ten--eight, nine, ten... It's probably eight or nine years old now as a site. It was when Hurricane Sandy was hitting New York, which was November 2012. So it's almost 10 years old. I think up until that point, my development/designing career had only just sort of started. And I recommend this to a lot of people when they sort of say "how do I level up these things?" I was just in a mode, which was produce as much work as possible, and from each of those things, learn, essentially, the small lessons. And I had a couple of rules around that. The primary one really was to finish everything that I started to a certain degree, you know. It doesn't have to- if you start trying to build a Facebook or something like that, you're destined to fail. But yeah, I was just sort of messing around with building experimental web and experimental, you know, HTML5 stuff. It sort of just came through the web. So I was just trying to design and build things that would be a little bit tricky to build, or things that were previously in flash that I could bring to HTML5 and then take the lessons with me. And as part of that, I was spending a lot of time just looking for experimental sites and odd things that existed and essentially just built up a slow list of them and was like, "hey, let me kind of make a curation of these things. We're locked inside from the hurricane anyway." So I pulled together The Useless Web there. And it's all static, you know. There's no database or anything like that. Why build a database when I just need a list of 100 links? It's a fuckload of clones, which sort of annoys me a little bit. So yeah, I just pulled those together. And it honestly shot to popularity almost immediately, which is a little bit of gratification. It's a little bit easier now to Google useless websites because of this site. But at the time, there was no real index.

It is starting to be one of those things as well: the longer it lives- I sort of realized this as well with my projects and like what I've been releasing. When you make a website or something right now, it'll exist online, especially a useless one, like the ones that I'm building, and maybe 10 people or 20 people will see it or something like that. But it's almost like fucking stock investing or something like that; you have something and if you make the commitment to leave those links running and leave that site up online, somebody will remember it in three weeks, and somebody will remember it in three years, and somebody will be like, "what's that fucking website with the horse where you keep scrolling down?" So I try with my projects now, too. And, you know, I fall in and out with them. Like, there's probably a period of two years where I didn't really update The Useless Web, and then I sort of fall back in and it's like "fuck!" you know, I gotta keep maintaining it. It takes time. But seeing the continual traffic is very nice.

The code, the code. It's actually also a rule- one of the sort of rules that I have about finishing projects is not to fucking buy a domain name until I'm like, 80 or 90% through finishing something. And then I usually put it on the domain and then use that, like, "oh, fuck, now I have almost finished website, in the public on a URL. Let me like, use that as a push to get the final percentage." I got not a single domain without it.

My degree is video game engineering. And I got that almost ten, twelve, thirteen, fourteen years ago, in Australia, where I'm from, and basically, towards the end of it- I mean, it wasn't a good fucking degree. It's no, no Princeton--shitty fucking Queensland University. But towards the end of it, I started to actually look a little bit objectively and be like, "Fuck, I can barely build games." They've taught us for years. I think there's probably better ways of teaching it now. And I know that better schools and teaching methodologies are doing it. But at the time, it was essentially just a lot of courses in computer science that they sort of pinned together with some design, and were like "you can totally fucking code games now," which wasn't so much the case. But also right at that time, all the nice web stuff started coming a lot faster. So we got HTML5, we got CSS3. And we got like, transitions, and just suddenly everything got- I mean, in a sense, it's boring. But at the moment, at the time, it was like way nicer, right. So I sort of got enamored by web design and the interactions, and there was a lot of envelope that could be pushed compared to like the texty, sort of tabling geo cities kind of websites that exist. It's a quick, not a quick pivot, but I still- like, it's weird for me because it's my job and also my hobby. Which is not the- I mean, I feel very lucky, I guess, in that I found something very early on that I could dedicate myself to with no sort of steps.

Ah it's a good question. I mean, I have my favorite sites. I think one that I really love is- Did you ever play Universal Paper Clips?

Okay, let me fucking ruin your life. Okay, here it is. I am going to put in Zoom chat. I've sort of been building- like, I've been leaning a little bit towards more recently building sort of small gaming websites? Not- I mean, I'm just sort of sticking them in the useless realm. This fucking paperclip game is the perfect example. I want to build something like this essentially where it's like, a game that- I don't know, it just consumes more and more and more of your time. That's what I'm interested in basically: wasting time. And if I like had infinite money, I would just try and build games constantly.

Um, let me have a look at my own. I've gone, I've gone both ways. I've had something that I built that I was like, "oh, this is gonna be like a really big hit." And it's not a big hit. But I have a few categories. The generative artistry, which I'll put here is something that I sort of got big into and gave a lot of my time. The primary thing being the tutorials and the self writing code in them as like a "hey! we're teaching code again," because my degree was fucking useless, and I think they didn't really teach it in a productive way. So that's one of my favorites. But then more recently, I gave a talk on like coding and Mosquito.js-

The point of it- I mean, it sort of got a little bit fucked by COVID. But the point was, I just want to make something that I would be able to give a conference talk about. I gave one video talk to Bang Bang Con, which is fucking amazing. That whole conference does a really good job of like getting quirky web stuff together and getting people to talk about it. But I haven't really been able to sell it on a higher plan. I have a bunch of new sites recently. I have been building just like junky ones, like checkbox race, which are just, I don't know, like very, very quick examples of like, "hey, let me just play around with one smaller cake and move in." But I think for me, usually, it's like, whatever I'm working on is the one that I like.

That's a good question. I mean, I try to be humorous in most of them, and I try to- I don't know, like, hit a vein that it's important not to be super serious all the time about development. You know, I have some of these--like the tutorial website--that are more on the serious side. But if you're on my site, it's like, I have a filter. So you can filter by like, the serious things and the jokey things and like talks and podcasts and stuff like that. I'm honestly really close to redesigning this, I think. But yeah, I mean, that's what I try to aim for. Even when you're building something that is a little bit sarcastic there's still like, important lessons in there that you learn, especially as a designer or developer. You still want it to be nice, you know, and you're still like, putting into application the principles you've learned. So I don't know, I try to keep those things in mind usually. I have like a to do list of fucking a billion different ideas that- you know, sometimes I'm like "this is great!" And then sometimes I look back and I'm like, "Damn, dude, stupid idea." I keep them there--just for reference, just in case it suddenly sounds great again.

I just registered- remember that Superbowl ad everyone went crazy for that with the QR code? I just registered this floating QR code where I'm just gonna make it cyclic. I've done the work--most of the work. I just need to put it all together. I've got a couple of other ideas. I have been on a Useless Web kick lately where I've just been buying my own domains and like adding them to it, which has been- I don't know really know why I'm doing it. It's like I want to feel productive. But I'm not. I want to add a bunch more stuff onto the Always Judge a Book by its Cover. I have so many more in a list, but it's a little bit taxing to be like, "let me write a fucking blog post." Also, one of the sites, which is called weirdandconfusing.com, I had it on eBay with eBay affiliates. And those guys basically cut me off. They're like, "you're abusing this." And I was like, "you fucking emailed me and asked me to do it in the first place." I want to do like a full redesign of that and make it a little bit more reasonable for affiliate and maybe try and get a few dollars out of that if I can. What else, I mean, the list is honestly endless.

A lot? Yeah, probably like five years ago my mentality was one thing at a time only. And I would just fully drive a product or project from start all the way to the end. And, you know, the last part of everything always is difficult. And I think once I got more experience, and I got the confidence that I'm going to be able to finish these things, I started. So if I have a few things, and I can actually do different work depending on my moods. If I'm feeling like, "oh, I can actually sit down and write and like, do a lot of boring things in a row," I'll work on something that already exists that just needs content. It's very of the moment.

It's changed over the years. That's interesting to think about, but there have been times- I was actually fired from my last job. Fuck those guys. But it was a company that I was thinking about all the time. It was my personal life and my professional life. And after getting fired by them, I was like, "Oh, shit, I'm never doing that, again." I'm never gonna fully dedicate, or even put, like, on my Twitter profile my company. Those things are now completely separate. I'm not gonna tweet about work, or very, very, very rarely. I don't often tweet or do anything public about about code stuff. Usually, it'll be fun demos, or inspiring work that people are doing. So there's a separation in that sense. But in terms of the actual work, it often can be not very different at all. But I don't mind that. I've got a good mental sort of lock off. Sometimes it definitely feels like too much, and then I don't end up doing much personal work, but then I start to sometimes get a bit--I don't know if depressed is the right word. But it's like, "oh, I need a creative outlet and my creative outlet just so happens to be also my fucking work outlet." But at times, you know, work aligns.

Yeah, it goes both ways. I'm actually going back to Australia next week for a huge vacation thing. They finally opened the borders up.

Yeah, everyone, everyone. It's been a couple years.

Like I said before, I was very, very lucky in that I knew I wanted to do this early. And a few sort of things that were very beneficial to me sort of came from that. I would say backup all of your code on GitHub. It's free anyway. Like everything- I put every single thing on there. I think you have unlimited private now for free as well. So it's like, I'll create a store and put literally all of my code in there. And I go all the way back to my university, like some of the assignments that I did, and some of the things I've built there. And it's crazy to look back at and be like, "what the fuck?" Sometimes I see smart things. Sometimes you see, obviously, catastrophically silly things. You know, you go through a lot of phases as a developer, which I went through too. There's this, like, the learning phase, but then there's like a middle phase where you're like, "everything has to be perfect. And I'm like insanely smart by doing everything like this way." And then eventually, you get past that. And you're like, "oh, we can- things don't have to be completely perfect." But I can move at a pace that feels good. So I was, I was very fortunate to go through those relatively early. I was very fortunate to have a lot of people to ask questions. I backed up everything. I always try to finish what what I start--unless, of course, I went a little bit too ambitious, but that doesn't happen too often. My big advice would be still do the boring things and try to make them fun. Because there's always something to learn there. And also the people that end up ahead, in my opinion, are the people that have the tenacity to get through those bits.