One of my fellow Recurse Center alums shared a wonderful idea—which shouldn’t be a surprise, considering that the Recurse Center community is probably the most inspired community I know. For a few years, they’ve made April 4th “Deletion Day”, a day focused on deleting and cleaning up. This year they made a website for it.
I enjoy this concept. I enjoy making myself vulnerable and being open, and I hope that this blog reflects that. But I like to do so on my own terms. I’m not particularly active on any social network these days, apart from Github. While you can find bits and pieces of information about me scattered all over the web—I wasn’t always as vigilant about curating my online persona as I am now, and the internet reminds me of that1.
So what am I doing for this deletion day?
Github and its community have been good to me. I’ve gotten a lot of support and friendly messages about my work over the years, and I don’t intend to significantly scale down my activity there. But sometimes curating this profile does feel like a chore, an obligation. In an effort to counter that I set up my own instance of Gitea. Most of my Carp libraries already have their main home there, and Github only has mirrors of these repositories. Over the course of this year, I’d like to make that true for more and more of my work. It will be less explorable, perhaps. It will be less siloed, surely. And I get to dictate the terms of what to share, which is what is most important to me.
With all of that said, this year’s deletion day will be spent moving some of my repositories that noone cares about to begin with over to my Gitea server. I have an irrational fear of rendering my online persona less appealing by moving things out of the public eye, and by losing those terrible and addictive green cubes on my profile.
I’m very easily tricked into optimizing for leaderboards and statistics. I don’t want my life to be influenced by them as much as they are right now, though, and I think taking a step back would be good for me. So that’s what I’m going to do.
Happy deletion day, everyone!
Footnotes
1. Having a fairly uncommon name further complicates things, but I like my name a lot and wouldn’t want to change it ever. Every name comes with its own benefits and drawbacks, I suppose.