About & Colophon

 My name is Dylan James. I'm a software developer and former Philosophy major, concentrating in Kantian studies. I live in New York and love working on interesting problems. If you want to contact me regarding freelance or consulting work,  you can do so here. For anything else, such as comments or questions, you can use my contact page.

I enjoy reading nonfiction literature across technology, science, history, medicine, philosophy...anything I can get my hands on really. I have particular domain interest in technology and the startup culture, and I feature commentary on that scene somewhat frequently here. I also read fiction; Stephen King and Dean Koontz are among my favorite authors, and A Song of Ice and Fire and Lord of the Rings are my favorite series.

This blog is a smattering of curated content I've either written and found worthwhile. It revolves around the daily minutia I want to express, whether that be on tech, personal or miscellaneous platforms. See below for a breakdown of whatever isn't immediately self-explanatory.

Colophon

This website represents my tastes and interests - essentially, anything of an intellectually satisfying nature. For more about me, read the  above bio.

Contents

 Most is self-explanatory. Quotes are collected from all over and span a variety of subjects, from technical to political to business and negotiation strategy. Pins gives a steady feed of my Pinboard account. And of course, you can subscribe to me via RSS. My blog is split into longform and linked-list formats, each with their own RSS feeds. I welcome comments on anything I write on my blog, but I've disabled comments. If you'd like to know why, you can read a stellar explanation by Matt Gemmell on his blog. The tl;dr reason is because I'd rather have you either email me, respond on your own blog, or say nothing at all. Responding via anonymous comments has such a low barrier to entry that I've found content quality is disproportionately bad to how easy it is to submit a comment. If you have a serious thought, I'll read and respond, just not at the bottom of my post.

Typography

I'm a big believer in readability - especially as I have almost no other content to get in the way of that. You won't find a large difference between my website and the RSS feed. Most text is Calluna Sans (at least 16 px) so it remains neat and large enough to read. Body width is optimized to between two to three alphabets long, taking up as much of the screen as it can without exhausting the reader, while not leaving lines so short that you lose track of your place. If you have a blog, I encourage you to try this out. Everything that can be referenced is linked to, insofar as I remember and I am able to do so.

Standards

As said, this blog uses a barebones layout. I've tried to add stylistic touches in HTML and CSS that won't break your web experience. Footnotes in particular are in jQuery as it allows a handy popup so you don't lose track of where you are on the page. That said, it has been tested and works on Firefox and Google Chrome. It's optimized for Chrome and Firefox as those are what I use. It should run fine on Internet Explorer, but I don't use (or enjoy) Windows enough to debug often. Comments that things are failing on it are appreciated, but I can't guarantee I'll get to it soon (or ever, really). I have overridden mobile browsing where possible as I personally hate the current mobile web experience. If it takes a little longer to load, I assure you it's better than the alternative.

Disclosures

It's become fashionable (or required, depending) to disclose every sponsorship or endorsement a blog has, especially if it might influence a reporting opinion. I am not supported by any sponsorships, advertisements or endorsements of any kind. Thus, these do not apply to me. 

Toolkit

 This site is hosted by Squarespace. It strikes an uncommonly clean balance between total tweakability and "just works" setup; I highly recommend it. I use WriteRoom (in Markdown) for distraction-free writing before I upload to the blog. BBEdit and Emacs are used for all other code-specific text editing. When I'm on the go, I use Vesper for note taking and writing before I get back to my computer.

Copyright

I reserve rights to my work, insofar as that's a thing on the internet. Really just give me credit and I don't mind where you put my writing. Obviously no commercial uses.