---
title: Many years, many roads I have travelled
date: 2026-05-23
description: I'm back to blogging after 15 years. A compressed-time story of exploration, failure, evolution, and a desire to reconnect with the community.
author: Dave Balmer
tag: Personal, AI, Duso
---

It's been about 13 years since I blogged. Back then I was on a crusade to elevate and promote JavaScript as a solid app development language. I made Jo, an early JS framework for making web apps with JS and CSS. I was early to the SPA craze.

Since then I worked for some startups, made a massive suite of medical web apps that won't see the light of day, started a tabletop game company, put out some okay games and one good one, crashed said company because of a lot of variables, not the least of which is, what the hell do I know about print and importing and distribution and tariffs, released a passion project on Steam because what lunatic makes a word puzzle game for Steam, and was dragged kicking and screaming into the new "AI in everything" wave by my dad, who's always been an early tech adopter.

So, hi! I have things to talk about. I've accepted AI into my life. I'm the human in the loop and it's actually okay. It's helped me get back into what I'm good at, and helped make some really fun projects like Arland.ai and Duso. My new babies.

I'll be sharing stuff I've learned, voicing opinions, because I hear the Internet doesn't have enough already, and maybe poking fun at overhyped things in software development.

Mostly I just hope to reconnect with the community. I hope my perspectives are relevant and useful. Let me know either way.