About

Since the beginning of the web – somewhere in the nineties, when I was working at Sun Microsystems – I have been writing posts. I used a myriad of domains to publish them – martien.steenbergen.nl, aardrock.com, aardrock.nl, martien.aardrock.com, martien.aardrock.nl, therockfamily.nl, pearllanguage.org, pareltaal.nl, aardnoot.nl, and a handful of subdomains, often a wiki. I exclusively used WordPress and Mediawiki.

Since 2010, converting all these web sites to a static site has been lingering in the back of my head…

Since 2018, I have been using Observable, an ideal combination of Markdown, JavaScript, SVG, CSS, and D3.

Observable reminds me of NeWS (Network extensible Window System), a windowing system developed by Sun Microsystems in the mid-1980s. NeWS is device independent, and used PostScript as programming environment and rendering engine. Very versatile and powerful, especially for its days. NeWS was way ahead of its time. I have been longing for a similar platform ever since. Enter Observable…

Early in 2024, Observable announced Observable Framework, an open-source static site generator for data apps, dashboards, reports, and more. Wow! I can use JavaScript, SVG, CSS, D3, Markdown, and more to have all of my posts published fast and cheap.

Late 2024 – at the age of 66 – I decided to collect all of them on a single place and clean them up.

We’re talking about hundreds of posts. A long list of post titles is not the way forward. So I need a way to organize them into specific clusters or categories. Hence, I need a collective term for these specific areas of interest. So, this site uses zones.