Back in prehistoric times, around 2010, there used to be a service called Posterous that allowed you to run a blog simply by emailing your text and photos to a special address. It shined in its simplicity and its elegance: it was extremely easy to use and the blog pages always looked beautifuly minimalistic. You could create a place on that vast world wide web that felt like your very own; millions of people used Posterous every day, but your little place was just yours. My wife LOVED it, She would post pictures of every little leaf or squirrel or droplet of water or ray of sun through the leaves of a tree, or shadows making funny shapes. I in turn loved visiting tthose pages and seeing the world through her eyes.

Around that time, we also used to have a little boy whom we loved to hold in our arms, young, and pure, full of innocence but also eager for his own adventures and his independence. We would go for walks together and he’d right away set off down the road ahead of us with a blue balloon clamped to his chest, as serious as if he'd been sent on an errand. That is the image that I still go back to whenever I think of him.

That was sixteen years ago. Posterous was acquired by Twitter in 2012 and of course eventually shut down in 2013. All the posts that my wife had created were lost, along with the photos. 

And the little boy grew up too. These days walking with mom and dad brings him less joy than it used to, but his independence and hunger have not changed. He has become a wonderfully rich guy, loving and loved by friends, excited about knowledge, passionate about literature and writing, eager to start his adult life. Yesterday, in fact, his mom and I drove him to the airport, gave him a huge hug, and sent him off to Scotland, where he’s starting his degree in English Literature. He's taller than both of us now, and in the last photo we took by the car as we said goodbye it's his arms around us. I thought at that time of the little boy with the balloon, and then I remembered Posterous… and I thought “why not rebuild it, so we can both once post our small observations about the new life that opens up (and mostly so I can see the wonderful pictures that she’ll take)?" 

In these years technology has changed too. Posterous must have taken months to write. I instead asked Claude to build it, and in a day of back-and-forth we got it running, live, in production. It is a wild and exciting new world, both for the boy with the balloon, and for his parents. The AI is astonishing, but also are all the different technologies and pieces that were involved, their quality and their sheer number: free lightweight workers on the Cloudflare edge, buckets and SES on AWS, a $8/month server in the cloud, Terraform to set it all up, Kamal to manage the deployments, Docker to package the executables, Markdown for formatting, image conversion and compression, and on and on. 

We both, he and I, had to translate Ovid’s “Tempus fugit” line in high-school. “Time slips by unnoticed and cheats us as it flies”. He was talking of Adonis growing up, "just now a beautiful baby, now a youth, now a man”. My son one day gave me a book of his favorite Wordsworth poems, with 

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower; 

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind

I feel that way. I miss what we had… but I am also very excited about this new phase, his and ours. 

This post and pictures seemed like a fitting start for our fresh new adult and our fresh new blog (“whispress", from whisper press). I can’t wait to see what my wife posts at https://anita.whispress.net !