About

This is a personal blog by an IT project manager who writes essays and rants on project management, technology, software development, politics, and the occasional review. The name of the game is shipping on schedule without losing one's soul, and most of what you'll read here is a working theory of how to do that.

What this site is

This site is a classic, self-hosted blog. It's built to be fast, quiet, and respectful. There are no advertisements, no sponsored content, no affiliate links, and no pop-ups begging for your email address. The only thing that happens when you click something is that a server renders a page for you.

Privacy

This site sets exactly one cookie, named dzu_seen_hero. It has no value. It is set on your first visit so that the home page can hide its welcome banner on subsequent visits. The cookie is SameSite=Lax, HttpOnly, valid for 365 days, and is not used for tracking, advertising, or fingerprinting of any kind. It is set server-side and is never manipulated by JavaScript.

This site does not use analytics. There are no analytics scripts, no tracking pixels, no session recordings, no third-party cookies, and no fingerprinting. The server logs standard web-server fields (IP address, user agent, path) solely for operation and abuse prevention; those logs are not sold, shared, or analyzed for marketing.

If you leave a comment, your name and the text of your comment are stored and shown publicly. Your email address, if provided, is stored but is never displayed anywhere on the site and is never used for any purpose other than, potentially, contacting you about your comment.

Colophon

This site is built with Ruby on Rails and Hotwire (Turbo Frames, Turbo Streams, and Stimulus). It is server-rendered, meaning the pages you see were generated by a server and shipped to you as HTML. The fonts are self-hosted — Inter Variable for body text and Fraunces Variable for headings — so your browser never talks to a third-party font service. All images are served from this site's own domain.

The site has no analytics, no trackers, no social share buttons that call external APIs, and makes zero third-party HTTP requests when you load a page. It respects prefers-color-scheme with a dark theme, and prefers-reduced-motion.

The whole thing runs on PostgreSQL, uses full-text search from the database itself, publishes an Atom feed and an XML sitemap, and is deployed from a single Git repository.

How this blog is made

Every article goes through a deliberately human process. An idea gets argued with, rewritten, cut down, and argued with again. Schedules are forecast, then reality happens. A lot of what you'll read here is the difference between the forecast and the reality, and what a project manager does about it.

About the name

"I'm the project" is the answer an overworked project manager gives when asked how things are going — because whatever the project is, the project manager is, in some sense, the project. The portrait on the home page, a candid of the author dressed as Niccolò Machiavelli, is a reminder that in project management, the politics are at least half the job.

Contact

There's no contact form on this site, because forms build mailboxes you only check when you think it's quiet. If you want to reach the author, the comments on any article will do.