.42

Dear Douglas,

You died in 2001. I was sixteen, which felt old at the time and feels impossibly young now. I didn't find out until weeks later, in the way you found out things back then — someone mentioned it in passing, and the world kept going like it hadn't just lost something irreplaceable.

I read The Hitchhiker's Guide when I was twelve. I didn't understand half of it. I understood the half that mattered — that the universe is absurd, that the people in charge rarely know what they're doing, and that the most important thing you can carry is a towel. Also that the answer to everything is 42, which is the kind of joke that only gets funnier the more seriously people take it.

You taught me that humor and intelligence aren't opposites. That being clever doesn't mean being serious. That the funniest thing about existence is that it exists at all, and the saddest thing is that it doesn't last, and somehow those two facts can live in the same sentence.

I built this site because of you. Not directly — you didn't write Nuxt tutorials — but because of the way you thought about technology and humanity and the weird spaces between them. The Hitchhiker's Guide was an iPad before iPads existed. You saw where we were going and made fun of it before we got there.

The panic engine exists because you were right: the single most useful piece of advice in the galaxy is "Don't Panic." And because sometimes the best way to deal with anxiety is to give it a score, a progress bar, and a whale game.

I don't know if you'd like this site. I think you'd find the terminal charming and the panic engine amusing and the duck mascot slightly unsettling. I think you'd appreciate the easter eggs. I think you'd tell me to write more and code less, which is advice I'm actively ignoring.

Thank you for the towels. Thank you for the whale and the petunias. Thank you for Marvin, who understood something about sadness that most people pretend not to know. Thank you for making a twelve-year-old feel like the universe was worth paying attention to.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

— The Duck