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Elmer's weblog

“Look ma, no javascript!” inspired by

ONEBILLIONSECONDS.IO

I did not think I was going to get old… how wrong I was! Years ago, I watched Neil deGrasse Tyson explain how deceptively long one billion seconds is. One billion seconds is a good way of splitting a hypothetical 90-year life into three parts. Having recently passed my first one-billion-second milestone, I felt the need to make something to commemorate the moment. As a nerd with little creativity, I decided to make a one-billion-second calculator website: onebillionseconds.io

To prove how uncreative I am, here is a list of other folks who made the same thing before me: meandeviation.com, zertrin.org, brainbashers.com, brownspaceman.com, billionbirthday.com, freecalculator.io, tigre-bleu.net, Wait But Why, bryanbraun.com, weeksoflife.com, lifecalendar.io, and Robert Waldinger.

Over the years, I’ve made several attempts at a personal blog. First, when I learned the basics of HTML and JavaScript back in high school — I abandoned that blog because I spent 80% of my time trying (and failing) to make the page look “cool”. Silly me, couldn’t I see that fancy CSS is just fluff? It would be years before I ran into the motherfucking website series (better, even better, best, perfect, secure) — ironically, the MFW series demonstrates how web dev gets out of hand with endless layers of complexity. I tried again in college, when I thought my schoolwork on threads and concurrency controls was outstanding and the world had to know about it. And now I give it a third try — this time as a seasoned software engineer with shockingly little front-end experience, but with the knowledge that fancy styling is nothing but fluff1.

Creating a blog wasn’t the original goal. The goal was to create a calculator site to tell a story about the unintuitive nature of large numbers. But as I struggled with the mess that is modern web development, I decided to keep a journal of my progress, which eventually became this blog. The “oneb” name was initially inspired by getting lazy writing onebillionseconds over and over again. The name grew on me and took on a meaning of its own: one blog, one bit/byte, or a play on words of an ordered list that doesn’t discriminate (“one, b, III”). I’m curious to see where this blog iteration goes and how long it sticks around. Thanks for reading!

Footnotes

  1. Me from the future! LLMs are a thing. They will make a pretty-looking website for me, while I remain blissfully unaware of how to write CSS. ↩

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