A self-hosted personal blog in 2025? How quaint, amiright?
As others have written about extensively, the web used to be cool before all the content got locked up in soulless corpo walled gardens like Substack, Facebook, X, even YouTube. Because it improves engagement metrics these places intentionally make it difficult to link to content on other parts of the open internet. This “link equity” – the ability to send traffic anywhere you’d like – is the main compensation mechanism for content creators that aren’t explicitly selling something or monetizing their stuff with ads. I can’t fix the whole internet but I can at least create a nexus for all my content that links into all these walled gardens. So that’s what’s happening here.
I’m really good at starting projects but not great at finishing them. Naturally, to solve this problem I have started a new project: this blog. My vain thought is that people who care about whatever I might be working on will subscribe to my updates here and then I can send people links and they can actually click on them without getting deboosted by the gods of X or YT. I’m cutting out the middleman. Of course this means I also lose all the free discovery that one would get on a platform like Substack. This is often really valuable and people discount that. So we will see how this goes.
Ok, but back to the central question.
I’m John Shedletsky. I’m from Brewster NY, which is like the last train station on metro north, where the suburbs around NYC finally start to become farmland. I’m 40ish and live in Silicon Valley. I have two degrees from Stanford where I studied Computer Science, Classical Literature, and Biology – kindof the spanning set of human inquiry. I’m sortof a software engineer, but compared to people who are really good at it I just write awful code really fast. I’m mostly an artist and tinkerer. I like making things. I’ve had a personal webpage in some form or another since Geocities (Athens/Olympus/9788, not notable enough to survive in any archive) and this is the most recent incarnation.
My first job out of college was being a code monkey at Roblox in 2006, a position I found through total serendipity. I instantly clicked with the founders who were both a fair bit older than I. As the only member on the team who was recently (and probably forever) 13, as the company grew I naturally slotted into a product role there while also writing awful C++/C# code with hilarious comments in it. Later I wrote some really awful SQL code also. Still it was definitely a forging in the Lord of the Rings sense. That game has tiny bits of my soul in it everywhere, which imbues it with a true power. I’ll probably write about that experience some more, this is just background. Professionally I know a lot about building platforms, consumer internet, and startup stuff.
What else might I write about here? Well, if you don’t subscribe you’ll forget this page exists and never find out. Unless it gets really popular and then you find out about it 3 weeks later from your cool friend (assuming you have one).
Here’s what is top of mind at the moment:
- I’m currently trying to become a french popstar before the end of the summer, so watching me fail at that will probably be hilarious. Or if I succeed it will be even funnier. btw my french is worse than my C++.
- I was actively working on a digital trading card game with an interesting twist, but then realized I didn’t have the game design really nailed down, but it’s a really cool idea and it’s bound to resurface in some form or another.
- I’m writing a children’s book. It’s basically done. I need to typeset it and that part is really boring. But it’s looking good.
- I want to replace my Amazon Echo with a homebrew solution that doesn’t spy on me. It looks like I have to build it from scratch myself.
- I’m kicking around ideas for a collection of short stories around the nature of free will.
- I play a lot of weird indie games that no one has heard of. Maybe it would be interesting to write about some of them.
- I think the formalization of mathematics into LEAN is really interesting and sets mathematicians up to make 500 years of progress in the next 50. In general I’m interested in limits and boundaries in math and physics. I don’t know if I have anything novel to say about it, but I read stuff from people who do. It might surface here.
- I do some startup investing and I might write about startup stuff.
- Sometimes I see really sublime Roblox games and I might write about those.
- I collect Lego, books, magic & pokemon cards, videogames and art.
- I think esports needs a rebrand but are fun to watch sometimes.
- I’m pretty bullish on the apotheosis of mankind and think we will get to see it.
- I like memes. Some percentage of posts will be pure brainrot and I’m not sorry.
In closing, please enjoy this Geocities classic. It is a tiny prayer in .gif form.
btw look at this glorious gallery of old timey construction gifs that I found. For a better articulation of blogging as performance art, this one is good.