I’ve been putting in some long hours working on Annaboka (feel free to log in, check it out, give me feedback! anna-at-annaboka.com) and I’ve come full circle on one of my least favorite forms of self-knowledge, realizing you didn’t know what you didn’t know.

I’ve been cruising around with a 1998 version of web engineering, and it has kept me in this nice bubble of knowledge, albeit limited knowledge. Sure, I knew CSS, but I forgot all of those lovely aspects of it- forgot or had never learned?- and realized I had put in hours and days and weeks on bad design decisions. If I had just listened to some knowledgeable friends (CINDY) who had offered up the meager suggestion that I do it in (real) CSS instead of the cobbled together, crickety version I had going. Sigh. Well now, it is better, and clearer, and the code is clean, and I can do a ton more backend and front end gizmos since… did I say this already?.. the codebase is a lot cleaner.

I still have more to learn, but at least I’m in a place where I know what I don’t know. (well, until I find out something I didn’t know.)