Cam PeggAbout Me
I'm an Aussie expat living in New York City with my wife and an epileptic Shih Tzu named Omelette. During the day, I help people solve problems and build functional, intuitive, and delightful products and services that other people love to use with my colleagues at Critical Mass.
Outside of work, I used to try to get out running as regularly as I could, but I got injured training for a marathon, took an extended running hiatus, and am now trying to get fit again via kickboxing. I've never done martial arts before, and I'm incredibly uncoordinated, so it's an… interesting?… experiment. I've also (re-)taken up golf recently. I am trying to cultivate a daily reading habit and have been doing pretty well (I'm not precious about the format; both electronic and old-school, dead-tree style are cool). I also read a whole bunch of sites via RSS.
If you'd like to get in touch, you can email me at cam @ this domain. I don't do much in the way of commercial social media anymore, but you can find me on LinkedIn occasionally.
(It should go without saying, but any opinions expressed on this site are mine and mine alone and do not reflect those of my employer or clients. And sometimes I change my mind about things so they might not even be my opinions any more either. And just in case you were wondering, "onomatopoeia" describes a word that suggests the sound it represents, like "boom" or "splat.")
About This Site
Ceci n'est pas une blog (sorry, Mr Magritte!).
The question of what this site is about is a little complicated; basically, it's about whatever happens to grab my attention at any given time. That could be any combination of coffee, tech news, LEGO, Nintendo, strategy, James Bond, culture, space exploration, Star Wars, books, the IndieWeb, Tolkien, or (most often) whatever random stuff I come across. So I guess the short answer to the "what?" question is "Everything. But also nothing."
The machine that makes it go is built with Django, with a few other Python scripts running in the background to fetch data. Caveat: I'm not a "real" developer by any stretch of the imagination, so it's mostly held together by duct tape and wishful thinking. Previous versions used a bunch of semi-complicated build automation, but then I realized that that was a ridiculous thing to do for a personal site, so now I use the least complex setup I can think of.
I'm a big fan of the IndieWeb principles and am trying to make sure my site is as interoperable with the wider web as possible; posts are marked up with microformats, and interacting via webmentions is supported. I also federate my posts—which is just a fancy way of saying that you can follow @[email protected] on Mastodon or your ActivityPub-powered network of choice—via Ryan Barrett’s amazing Bridgy Fed service.