Westley Winks

Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

My name is Westley Winks. I lived my entire life in Oregon, growing up in a small town in Central Oregon and going to school at Oregon State University. In 2021, I graduated with a degree in chemical engineering. It was COVID and I was burnt out so I took a break from engineering while I tried figuring out what I wanted to do with my life.

I had the idea to be a Peace Corps Volunteer lingering in my brain since high school and I applied before I graduated college. I interviewed to go to Thailand and everything. Again, COVID happened and they suspended operations. A while later, at a low point in my life when I was running out of money, feeling useless, and not knowing what my life was going to look like, I got an invitation to be a volunteer.

I've been doing youth development in rural Morocco for over two years now. Outside of cultural integration and daily life, I have led digital literacy workshops, facilitated life skills curriculums, and taught English. This whole Peace Corps experience has been the most challenging and rewarding thing I've ever done. My service is ending in a few weeks and I'm looking for opportunities to continue serving others in a more technical capacity (please reach out).

I highly value learning and my hobbies reflect that. These days, I spend a lot of time writing, solving crosswords and puzzles, learning Arabic and Spanish, reading books and blogs, and coding. I love my friends and try and spend time with them regularly. Really, I just try to live every day with integrity and compassion.

What's the story behind your blog?

I've been following Giles Turnbull recently (i.e. fervently reading everything of his I can get my hands on) who was just on People and Blogs. His catchphrase "a blog is your brain, over time, on the internet" really resonates with me.

I think that's always been the vision with my blog and personal website as a whole, even though I didn't have the words for it. It started as "it'd be cool to have my own website" and I was bored enough that I learned basic web development to do it in late 2021. At first, I wanted something akin to a static portfolio or résumé that I could use to "sell" myself. It's transformed over the years to be more dynamic and focused on me as a human being rather than as a product.

At some point, I stumbled upon the indie web/personal web/small web corner of the internet and loved it. I started applying principles from that movement to my own blog and website. Now, it's a living thing that I post to regularly and change probably too often. My website has become less focused on what other people think and instead has become an authentic and sometimes vulnerable look into my mind and my character. On the front page, I list my recent posts, things I read across the internet recently, where else to find me online, and a values-based intro. Taken together, my website is an accurate online representation of who I am as a person and that's exactly what I want it to do.

I'm also quite proud of my Peace Corps posts where I share stories of my experience of Moroccan culture as I'm learning it. I'm in a really unique position to dissolve some of the preconceptions that Americans have about Arab and Islamic culture. I've put good data into people's minds, adding some cross-cultural understanding to the world, and that's a really powerful thing that I do not take lightly.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

Writing is something I didn’t know I liked doing until I started doing it regularly. As a “STEM person,” I thought I hated writing. Turns out I just don’t like writing about things I don’t care about.

My creative process is pretty unstructured. When interesting things come up that I want to clarify my own thoughts on or feel like I have something to say, I'll either immediately start writing it or jot it down on a sticky note or my notes app. Other times, I'll finish a project and simply want to document what I've done and learned. I've got a big list of post ideas too that I review each week and see if I'm drawn to write about one of them. I don't follow a schedule (besides my weeknotes) and I don't set any particular deadlines.

I write all of my posts in Markdown before they get pulled into my website. It's technically an Obsidian vault but I usually write using my favorite text editor (see the tech question for more details). Book notes start as Kindle highlights that I import into my Obsidian vault. I'll go through the highlights and summarize important points if it's nonfiction or review using a checklist if it's fiction. I start a weeknotes document at the beginning of the week and add bullet points to it as things happen so it's easier to write on Sunday.

I do put a lot of time and effort into the quality of my posts. Again, I want my website to be an accurate representation of me and that means doing my best to express what's in my brain as clearly as I can. Words are an approximation of thought and I try to make them as close of an approximation as I can. I don't put any half-baked thoughts on my blog. This means I'll do my research, look back over my journal and books for quotes that apply, find and link to people I get ideas from, and restructure the whole thing if needed. Usually I'll send it to a couple of people to get feedback but I haven't found a reliable way to ask for what I'm expecting out of it.

The posts I am most inspired to write and share are the ones where I include a personal story in a vulnerable way (e.g. A Love Letter to my Laptop, heyjohn, Wellbeing Tools or, A Long Overdue Apology). I get into a flow state when I'm chronicling how I felt, what I was thinking at the time, or how I've grown since then. It is liberating when I publish them even if it does feel a bit scary opening up to the entire internet. Being authentic is important to me as long as it's healthy. I wouldn't spill a vulnerable story for everyone to see unless I've already processed it for myself, offline, and decided it's a story to share with others.

After I publish, I'll send the link to friends who I think would be interested and post it on my Mastodon. If I'm lucky, I get some feedback, compliments, or thoughts from others which I love.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

Physical space absolutely influences my creativity. I've noticed I have a really hard time doing anything productive or creative unless I'm in a familiar place. Right now, that's my home at my humble desk with rusty drawers and desk chair that leans to one side and doesn't roll on the exposed concrete.

Music helps a lot, too. I have my big noise-canceling headphones on for most of the day. I listen to my normal music when writing or coding but lofi when I'm reading. Lately, my "normal music" has been Rex Orange County, Jarabe De Palo, and Chappell Roan.

One of my most prized possessions is my keyboard. It's a split Ergodox EZ. It has Cherry MX Brown switches, blank SA profile keycaps, and Alien (the movie) inspired G20 profile keycaps on the extra side and thumb keys. It's also programmable and I've tweaked the different layers enough that I can move around my computer pretty fast and rarely need to use my mouse. Reducing friction between thought and action really gets the creative juices flowing.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

YES, of course. My current stack is pretty awesome. I start the post in my Obsidian vault but am usually writing it using a modal text editor, Helix, in my terminal, kitty. This is the single point of truth for nearly everything I write.

I recently started using Bridgetown as my static site generator. It's written in Ruby (which I might be falling for) and I really like it. I wrote my own automation that pulls in notes from my Obsidian vault and converts the wikilinks to Bridgetown links. I also wrote a plugin that generates all the tag pages for my site based on what tags exist in the content. I did a complete stylistic makeover when I was switching to Bridgetown. I'm using Open Props for design tokens and SCSS for the CSS framework.

Finally, porkbun hosts my domains (wwinks.com and westleywinks.com) and I'm trying out Netlify as a web host after a long time with GitHub Pages mostly because Netlify lets you set redirect rules. I changed some paths during the makeover and wanted to reduce my link rot as much as possible.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

Besides starting earlier, I would optimize for personal happiness right off the bat. I spent too much time considering what other people would think when they visited my website (nobody was visiting it anyways). Instead, I'd make it a place that represents me, that I'm proud of, and write purely for me from the get-go.

For content, I wouldn't stick with one structure or try and stick to one "voice." I'm still trying to figure out who I am as a writer and forcing myself to write in a certain way because I want to have my own voice already is too rigid.

I'd also use wwinks.com from the start instead of westleywinks.com. It's half the length and people know how to spell it correctly if you say it out loud. I don't know why it took me so long to come to that realization.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

I was just thinking about this recently. My only cost is $24 per year for two domains, westleywinks.com and wwinks.com. The former just redirects to the latter but I wanted to lock down my full name just in case. Everything else I do myself and it's free to host static sites basically anywhere.

Of course, I understand why people monetize. Lots of time and brain power go into blogging. They are providing a service in exchange for money. You can tell when people are optimizing for clicks and attention rather than the value they are providing, though, and those make me wary. People can smell when you're trying to sell them something from a mile away.

I'm not pay-walling or selling anything on my site (and probably never will) for three reasons:

1. I write mostly for me with the hope that someone somewhere gets some value out of it
2. I learned a lot of what I know for free on the internet and it feels wrong to try and add a price tag to my retelling of that knowledge
3. Hardly anyone reads this thing anyways

Instead, I recently started accepting tips and added a Ko-fi link to the bottom of all of my posts. I am not expecting to make any money from this nor do I need to. It's not a measure of success for me and my site costs nearly nothing. I do put a lot of time and effort into my website and what I write, though. Accepting tips is offering one way for people to say "thank you, here is an appreciation token."

I value learning and serving others and those are what I use to evaluate what I'm doing. So, other ways to say thank you that are more valuable to me are sending me an email with a few thoughts or kind words, sharing the link with someone who might get something valuable from my writing, or commenting on a Mastodon post acknowledging that you read it. Still, I won't say no to a free coffee for my efforts.

I so badly want to support other bloggers but I just can't justify the costs right now even though they can be small. As a volunteer, I haven't made basically any money in the last two years. I get a lot of value out of other people writing and I will absolutely do my part financially when I can (again, reach out if you have a job opportunity for a chemical engineering graduate who has lots of inter-cultural experience and can code and write).

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

• everything changes by Mandy Brown. She's so thoughtful and I always get something from her posts.
• Notes by JCProbably. Really great writer and photographer. I'm a bit surprised she hasn't been a guest here yet.
• eieio.games by Nolen Royalty. They make really cool games and projects (you've probably seen One Million Checkboxes recently) and writes about them here. Very fun to read.
• Analog Office by Anna Havron. Writes about using analog and paper-based tools. I think they'd be a really good guest too.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

As I said earlier, I'm most proud of my cultural stories from Morocco. If you read just one thing from my website, pick a post from those and learn a little bit about a culture (probably) different from your own.

Please reach out anywhere you can find me online if you have any thoughts, ideas, opinions, musings, or just want to say hi. The internet is a wonderful place and I like when strangers interact with me here.

After that, stay curious, be compassionate towards others, and thank you for reading.

Your Most Humble and Obedient Servant,

Westley Winks
wwinks.com