Skateboarding
The Long Thank-You
Years ago a friend and I built a small app that mapped skateparks. It started as the kind of thing you make for yourself and a few friends: where are the parks, what are they like, are they any good, is the one two towns over worth the drive. We named it The Skatepark Project, registered the domain, put real care into it, and shipped it the way you ship a thing you love instead of a thing you’re selling.
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Everybody Can Dunk Now
Basketball tryouts run on a piece of equipment nobody talks about, and it isn’t the ball. It’s the tape measure.
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Riding an Invisible Ellipse
I rarely do things the easy way. In this case I designed and built a skateboard mini ramp not only to be durable and ride well, but also to look cool and blend into a residential environment where skateboard ramps aren’t always welcome with open arms. So from the jump I wanted it to look like it belonged, it needed to blend into the environment, a small pad I leveled within cedar tree woods with a surrounding limestone wall. Part of that blending involved open transitions, meaning instead of a squared off cut “box” to form the curved support structure, I wanted it curved top and bottom, which you rarely see done outside of metal framed ramps. I am not (yet!) a metalworker, so coming up with a way to have fully curved transitions was an integral part of the design.
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Becoming Gnarly
I keep bees, I ride skateboards on ramps, I ride bikes up hills without gears, I’ve written a lot of technical books, and I build software and games for a living. On a site that asks you to take all of that in at once, the reasonable question is what any of it has to do with the rest. The honest answer is that they’re the same decision made over and over in different spaces. I tend to pick the harder way to do a thing, and I’ve done it on purpose for long enough that it stopped being a series of choices and turned into a disposition. This is an essay that acknowledges the disposition, because everything else here is downstream of it.
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Skateboard Mini Ramp
A backyard skateboard mini ramp finished with Ramp Armor, tile, and pool coping — and the year-later teardown and rebuild.
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