This weekend, my wife and I registered for PAX Prime. For those of you who don’t know, PAX is the Penny Arcade Expo and is a gaming convention that covers the spectrum: console, tabletop, boardgames, and pen and paper. In addition to all the games, several panels will be held and there’s a good chance some of my favorite geek celebrities will be in attendance. In addition to the amazing convention, I’m looking forward to taking my wife around Seattle and showing her all the cool sites I saw when I was at An Event Apart back in March. Read more

For the past five years of my life, I’ve been a web developer. I’ve written probably a million lines of code and have developed at least 5 distinct medium to large-scale web applications or sites. Despite my accomplishments, whenever I get around other web professionals I feel like I don’t belong. Couple this with the quality of both the attendees and speakers at An Event Apart in Seattle, and I felt downright stupid. Everywhere I went, I saw lanyards containing some of the biggest names in the industry: Facebook, Microsoft, PageRank, and THQ. In this sea of giants, of people who have changed the face of the web, who was I? What had I accomplished? Did I really deserve to be here, or was my attendance simply a matter of paying for a ticket? Am I a fraud? That last question was the one I had to answer if I was going to truly gain anything from this conference. Read more

Two big thing occurred this week: I got a Kindle and I got glasses (the reading / driving kind). Now, I already own an iPad, so why get a Kindle? Well, while the iPad supports e-books, it does so as more of an afterthought than a main feature. Due to it’s small size, light weight, and use of Electronic Paper, the Kindle is much more suited for those situations where space is at a premium. Don’t let it’s small footprint fool you, however. The Kindle is capable of storing hundreds of e-books, giving you the ability to bring your entire reading library wherever you have time to kill. If you’d like to learn more about the advantages of owning a Kindle, you can check out my wife’s post “Why I Read More on My Kindle.” Read more

About a week ago the wife and I went out and bought ourselves an Kinect. I figured that Microsoft would think ahead and program the Kinect in such a way that wheelchair users like myself wouldn’t have too difficult a time using the device (though I did expect some difficulties). Here’s a breakdown of my experience. Read more

2010 was a busy year, but you wouldn’t know it from looking here. I’ve worked on a lot, I swear. A year’s worth of releases on an app no one sees (my day job), thousands of lines of code on an API class I haven’t finished, and countless ideas and inspirations moth-balled and subverted with a lot of wishful thinking, rhetorical questions,  and self-deprecating comments regarding myself and my career, courtesy of my own subconscious.

As I look back on the year, I’ve realized a simple fact: I spend more time crafting an answer for what I do as a person than I do developing a passion for what I’ve done as a web developer. My resolution for 2011, is that this changes.  In order to create this change, I’ve done a lot of thinking about the beliefs and mentalities I’ve built up over the years both as a person and a professional, and I’m faced with a very simple question: What the hell am I so afraid of, seriously? I think I have the answer. I, Levi Hackwith, am I afraid of being held responsible.

I’ve been dodging responsibility for most of my life in one form or another. Not necessarily as a whole, but in all the little things that scare me. I’d stay at a job I hated for fear of being responsible for finding a better one; I avoid taking charge or leading much of anything because I might be held responsible for the activities and people under me. This isn’t a fear of failure, of falling to the ground once out of the cocoon. This about getting out of the cocoon and being told told I have to fly.

My hope is that all of that changes this year, that I take responsibility for both my passion and my career. That this blog not be so much about web development or my life, but the pursuit of honesty and self-accountability, that I might actually better this Internet that I claim to love so much.