history

Here is a brief history of pacificpuzzleworks.com:

2001 I had dropped out of college and was working in a window & door making woodshop called Pacific Grove Millworks, but I wanted to start my own puzzlemaking business so I registered this pacifcipuzzleworks.com domain name, along with leekrasnow.com (because that seemed like a sensible thing to do) but at first I was only using the domain name to give myself the lee@pacificpuzzleworks.com email address.

2002 I had setup a few different versions of hand-written (well notepad.exe written) HTML websites that showcased a few puzzles that I had produced, but it was all pretty crude web design.

2003 I had been scraping by a living as a puzzlemaker in various ways for a few years and had produced (and photographed) so many different things over the course of the past few years that managing all of the website code "by hand" was getting to be problematic, and I could see that the problem was only going to get worse as time went on, so I started down the path of website development with the goal of setting up some kind of database driven system that would serve as a portfolio for all of the puzzles that I was planning to make. All of my database driven websites since have been of the popular Linux / Apache / PHP / MySQL / JavaScript technology stack. There were numerous variations of the portfolio website system in the early years as I got better at web development and expanded the scope of what I wanted this website to be.

2006 I had made so many variations of the website system over the previous few years that I was getting bogged down in how repetitive the programming work was getting. I envisioned a "meta" system of object oriented source code that could be expanded upon with customized modules for each type of data structure (example: puzzle design, wood type, image file, blog post, for-sale listing, order invoice, etc...) so that I didn't need to reinvent the wheel each time I wanted to create more in depth structure to how I was organizing my data in the system. This led me down a DEEEEEEP rabbit hole of setting up my own custom frameworks (that I simply call the "core" code). I have build perhaps a dozen different websites over the past 15 years using this core code. From my point of view, this was the point where the programming hobby project of mine got very exciting, but from your point of view, the quality and quantity and reliability of my online content went absolutely to hell, and it's been hit and miss what (if anything at all) has been available at pacificpuzzleworks.com ever since then.

2020-2022 I realized that if I didn't get around to finishing up this decades-long project of mine, then I maybe never would get it done at all, and perhaps I might even forget what I was trying to accomplish and/or how it works (I didn't put overly many comments in the source code) so at a few points when I had the gumption mustered up, I would chip away at making long-procrastinated bursts of work on the source code base to finish up hundreds half-finished aspects of my framework system which were all part of a galaxy of to-do sticky notes on the back burner of my slowly fading mind. Happily, a few of the stubborn problems that I had been batting my head against for years previously (like how to upload 100 files at once instead of doing 1 file at a time 100 times in a row) just sort of fixed themselves on their own by virtue of web browser technology maturing over the years. This was balanced out by how often I had to go through and comb through every line of code to upgrade syntax of one sort or another as the various libraries and function calls that I had been using got deprecated in one way or another. I think php started out somewhere in version 3 when I started my code base and now it's version 8.

2023 I had been eagerly following news stories about AI developments, specifically the DALL-E text-to-image generator, and then the ChatGPT system. I started seeing stories about how people were massively boosting their productivity using GPT for help. When GPT-4 came out I immediately started seeing numerous reports & posts by seemingly very smart people who were blown away by how powerful that tool is, especially at doing programming work for website system. I got the idea to team up with GPT to get my website back online. So now here it is. You probably can't tell much of a difference yet (other than it's here at all and that I have anything written on the home page beyond "hello world") but from my point of view the system and server situation have been borderline unusable for years but now it's running great thanks to the work that GPT and I have done lately. I'm stoked to start adding content to it now that it's working well. Stay tuned, because this site is UNDER CONTSTRUCTION!!