About view-source:

I'm M. Carter. I'm the CTO of Driver Digital, a boutique Shopify Plus agency that builds custom storefronts and other web-based apps for fashion and luxury brands. I've been building things for the web for about 18 years, which is long enough to have mass-deleted my early work and short enough that I'm still occasionally surprised by how something renders in Safari.

I'm also a writer. I've published essays and poetry in a variety of publications, and I've been writing publicly for longer than I've been writing code. The two practices are more related than they probably seem from the outside; both begin with the same discomfort, end with the same elated sense of achievement, and result years later in similar mild embarrassment.

This blog exists because I wanted to write things that didn't fit anywhere else. They weren't client-facing enough for Driver's blog, they were too tech-adjacent for my personal Substack, and they were too long for the team Slack. They tend to start with something I noticed while building things for clients or navigating agency life, and they tend to end up somewhere more general – questions about the narratives we become attached to, how we make meaning, about the future of work, and about cultivating embodied joy in an era in which I'm fairly confident screens are destroying my eyesight.

So: frontend-ish engineering, but not always about engineering, and not strictly for engineers. If you're looking for Liquid tutorials, this is probably not your spot (though I might occasionally get into it). If you're interested in what it looks like when someone who builds internet things for a living tries to think carefully about the work and the world it operates in, you might like it here.

I live in the French Alps with my wife, Dr. Aurelia Aubert, who is an American historian and therefore the person in the household least impressed by my day job and my running side-commentary on the state of U.S. politics. Our daughter, Lily, is one, and she is conducting a longitudinal study on which household objects can be safely put in one's mouth (findings forthcoming, sample-size enormous). We have cats who would like you to know that they were here first. When I'm not at a screen gradually losing my ability to drive at night, I want to be trail-running (more like, hiking quickly) or snowboarding (more like, falling strategically), or making something out of wood with my hands (as an excuse to have a workshop to sit and drink coffee in on a quiet morning).

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