Hi! Tell us about who you are and what you do

Howdy! I’m Taylor (mayor of taylor.town).

I’m a developer, designer, DBA, chaos muppet, etc.

What is your hardware setup?

M1 Macbook Pro, LG Display, Apple Trackpad, various ortholinear keyboards, Airpods Max, Yamaha HS5, Shure SM7B, monome, VIVO kneeling chair, and other junk.

And what are the favorite items in your workspace?

Cow peepy: committed a dangerous and disrespectful crime; out on bail

Stacey: my beloved ceramic pig, whose skin somehow feels like slimy velvet

Recursion mug: recursion mug

Shrine: random family gifts and pranks

Oxalis triangularis: my favorite plant (but not getting enough light)

Books: I sometimes judge books by their meme potential

Peach: my good ol’ doggo

Yamaha HS5 and keyboards

What is your software setup?

What are your favorite programming or scripting languages?

For frontend web work, I try to do as much as possible with “cheap” web HTML/CSS. For special occasions, I sprinkle vanilla JS on top. For complex UI stuff, I really like Elm. If no server is involved, I throw it on Cloudflare Pages.

For backend web work, my code tends to be 75% SQL (Postgres) with a bit of glue code. I choose whatever language provides the necessary speed/stability and SDKs, which is often Rust or Go or Elixir. Lately, my favorite “glue” has been Deno with Hono and Postgres.js, which I deploy on fly.io. I’ll probably switch to Roc once it becomes mature enough.

My friend Kartik recently convinced me that Lua is cool! I’m hoping to make a game or two with it someday.

For quick-and-dirty stuff, I use lots of GNU Bash and hate myself for it. I’m hoping to make scrapscript my default shell by 2025!

What book comes to your mind that you would like others to read?

Collections: Consider the Lobster, Anthropocene Reviewed, Exhalation Stories, Business Adventures

Books: Catch-22, A Timeless Way of Building, Gödel Escher Bach, Omnivore’s Dilemma, Good Earth, One Straw Revolution, Inner Game of Tennis, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Vagabond (manga), Men Machines and Modern Times, Toki Pona guide, The Design of Everyday Things

Authors: John Steinbeck, Neal Stephenson, David Foster Wallace, Derek Sivers

You can read all my recent book reviews here.

Anything else?

I included a bonus picture of my messy workstation from 2021! Enjoy :)