Brandon Cantrell

I almost went to cooking school when I got out of high school. I did not go, but cooking has always been around in one form or another. I grew up in the Midwest, where grilling was just part of life. My dad grilled when I was a kid, and I started doing it young too.

During the pandemic, I had more time to cook for myself and my son. That was when I started treating it less like dinner and more like something worth learning. I began looking up recipes, paying attention to techniques, and trying things that felt a little beyond my usual rotation. My son has since grown up and moved out, and now it is mostly me and my girlfriend. She is a very encouraging audience, which has probably made all of this worse in the best way.

I’ve had a running list of ideas for years. Geocities site as a kid, more WordPress installs than I care to count, even a stint as webmaster for ozarksbeekeepers.org. I clearly wasn’t afraid of the web. I just never actually built anything that was mine.

But I am genuinely, deeply lazy.

Not full self-deprecation — laziness has a useful side. It drives me to automate, simplify, find the path of least resistance and make that path actually work. Most of my career has been that instinct in action. Backend tools, scripts, things running on cron jobs that nobody ever looked at. Efficient, invisible, done.

The shadow side of laziness is that if there’s no easy path, I don’t start. Writing a full stack application from scratch was never the easy path. So I didn’t. The list of ideas just kept growing.

Welcome. After thinking about it for way too long, I’ve finally decided to start writing publicly about things I find interesting.