THE PRESS BOX
Who made this, what with, and why.
the domain
hotdogshere.com has been a personal test bin since around 2019. It's hosted a Signal proxy for Iran during the protests, a private instance of SearXNG, and various hand-coded experiments I built on a Linode box late at night.
The name comes from what vendors shout at baseball games. Get yer hot dogs here!
No deeper meaning. I bought the domain because I love them baseballs!
For most of its life this domain has been a place to mess around with self-hosting, Linux, Flask, Python, the kinds of side-projects that don't need to ship to anyone. This iteration is the first time it has something written on it that I actually believe you can benefit from.
the method
The Lineup borrows openly from two places.
The first is NASA's Project Approval Document — a single-page management instrument introduced in 1962 to manage the scope, costs, and authorization of every project the agency ran during the Apollo era. James Webb at NASA used these to put humans on the moon. I use the same discipline to decide what's on my plate next Tuesday.
And yes, the PAD system was designed by the same James Webb that the world's largest and most sophisticated telescope is named after.
I wanted to know how some of the world's biggest projects were managed before Asana, Things, Jira, Trello, etc.
So I looked to history, where pen and paper were first meeting computational power. That led me to the PAD system, and NASA was a perfect fit for me, being in the space sector.
The deep dive on this is a NASA history publication from 1982 called Managing NASA in the Apollo Era by Arnold S. Levine. It's in the public domain, and I've hosted a copy here for anyone interested in where the PAD methodology came from: download the PDF.
The second is Tiago Forte's PARA system — Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives. The Roster and the Shelf are my own thing, but they owe something to PARA's core insight that long-term responsibilities, current projects, and reference material need to be kept separate in your head and in your tools. The Lineup is what happened when I stripped PARA down to the parts I actually used and added the card discipline from PAD on top.
the stack
Built on Astro. Deployed to Vercel. Markdown content, plain CSS, no framework. The editor is mostly vim.
The earlier version of this site, the one that ran for years before this, lived on a Linode box on Debian with Nginx and Flask. There's no Linode anymore — Vercel is doing the work now — but the spirit of "made with my own hands on a server I own" carries forward.
The Astro source is in a git repo I control. The fonts are on disk. The PDF is on disk. If Vercel disappeared tomorrow I could move the whole site to any static host in an afternoon.
who
Made by Mikee, in Vancouver, BC.
By day, I'm building M33, a space data company. By spare-time-laptop-night, building a few other things.
I also own and run four yacht charter companies between the coasts of Mexico and Newport Beach, California.
The Lineup is the system I truly run my work and life on. I always just called it PAD, because of the NASA system, but as it evolved, I wanted to give it my own name to account for the modifications. It's been refined against real work, real product launches, real life. It's small, and it works.
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