January is the worst month for starting over

Hey all — been a little bit since I've blogged, felt like I should check in. I've been thinking about you, I promise! It's just with everything going on in the world, it's tough to feel like my little posts are worth writing. Also the weather is shit — whoever decided to start the new year here really messed up. But, you know, maybe this can be a small distraction. Here's a bit of what I'm working on lately:

Website / brand redesign

I've loved have a working spreadsheet as my personal site, but after adding the blog, and starting on the book, and I'm looking at starting up my YouTube channel again, it's not the most marketable. So I'm back in the CSS mines with a design I'm really enjoying, that feels like me, and the plan is to have that carry over into my visual identity everywhere else. It's exciting! Just... slow, especially as it's hard to be productive in this time of year -slash- state of the world. I'm pushing to have at least the website done by the end of the month.

More games and PICO-8 projects

I've been getting back into PICO-8, and really loving it! It's really relaxing to have something with really specific constraints while also providing all of its own tools, as it means I can put together something with graphics and sounds and music without having to overthink any of it if I don't want to. I've made a couple smaller games that I'll embed below, and I'm working on some slightly bigger ones that I'll post about next month. I even made a game as a birthday present for a colleague, which I'm keen to do more of this year.

TYLERCON 2026

My birthday's not until June but I've been deep in the planning process already, as this year I'm determined to finally make good on my dream of having a huge birthday party that's halfway between a tech conference and comedic summer camp for adults. I'm turning 35 this year, and I'm roughly the same age as the World Wide Web (also turns out I'm exactly the same age as EarthBound), so the theme of the event is "Celebrating 35 years of Online Excellence". I'm designing merch, there'll be a website, multiple talks and activities, the whole shebang. I've gotta lock down a venue soon. 😬

Work

Over at LEGO.com, I'm working on a variety of quality-of-life improvements to the Wish Lists features! This started with changes to back-end data, so now the retail side can do things like review how many people are wishing for a product before it comes out, and now I'm focusing on the front end and pitching a bunch of changes to make wishing easier and more useful. Of course I've also got to build this stuff as well so I can't go too crazy, but it's pretty positive so far so hopefully I'll be able to get a lot of it done this quarter.

YouTube / Podcast???

Speaking of work, I've been ramping down the various internal talks and hosting roles I've taken on there, and will be focusing on doing that kind of thing in my free time instead! Specifically, I really want to get back into making YouTube videos and showing folks how tech stuff isn't scary and how to use the digital tools they have at their disposal already. Things like spreasdheets, basic website development, PICO-8, all the stuff I've been interested in this whole time. A few people have also asked if I'd do a podcast, so maybe that's on the table as well! What would you like to hear me talk about?