Hobbies -= 1

I shut down a hobby today. BeerRiot, the site I started over six years ago, is now closed. I'm keeping the domain active, because I've used the name in other places, but browsers will see only a static archive of what used to be there.

BeerRiot began as an experiment. I wanted to learn about Erlang, and I needed a project to drive my curiosity. It worked, and I learned a good deal about modern web application development in the process. In fact, I learned enough about both that, through blogging about my progress, I was able to join up with a smart team and work in Erlang on web apps professionally.

In fact, even after the experiment paid off, BeerRiot remained my sandbox. New webservers, new storage techniques, new rendering processes, new API designs … I was able to practice with them all in a live setting before attempting to pull an entire team of engineers toward any of them.

So why would I give up my playground? Simply put: I don't play there any more. My interests have moved on, and it's time to remove the mental clutter of the service existing (no matter it's reliability). Were the virtual server some physical object, I'd be putting it on a garage sale. As it is not, I will instead throw a tarball on a backup disk, and laugh when I find it in a few years.

What's next? On the code side, more focus on that smart team and profession Erlang work I mentioned. On the hobby side … definitely not another web app. I'll keep this blog up. No promises on changes to its post frequency, but readers will be among the first to know when I find a new thing.

Cheers.