Main Thread

Main Thread is a newsletter and blog, loosely focused on software and technology, and how they impact our lives.

I’ve always been fascinated by the interactions between people and technology, so I decided to start Main Thread to encourage myself to write more. The primary goal of writing more was to clarify my own thoughts, but also to let me share those thoughts and collect feedback, in case others might find them interesting.

If you’d like to be notified when new posts are published, you can subscribe to the newsletter below:

👋 Hey there!

My name is Giles Van Gruisen. I’m a software consultant and photographer from New England. I grew up in southern Rhode Island, spent a number of years working with various startups in Boston and Cambridge, and now operate as an independent consultant helping early-stage technology companies build digital products. These days, I feel fortunate to split my time between seaside Newport, RI in the summer, the beautiful Green Mountains in Vermont in the winter, and traveling as much as I can afford to in-between.

Here are a few links to learn more about me

• Personal site
• Twitter profile
• Instagram profile
• GitHub profile

The “Main Thread”

Many programmers reading this will probably be familiar with the concept of “multithreading” in software, where multiple sets of instructions can be effectively executed in parallel. In most systems which require direct interaction with a user, the main thread is the thread of execution which first receives input from the user, dispatches to child threads for processing, and ultimately outputs some result. This can be represented as a continuous cycle of input, processing, and output.

At the risk of conflating humans to robots, I think the concept of the Main Thread offers a useful metaphor for how I find myself interacting with the world around me. I have some genetic code, sure, but voluntary actions comes as a response to external stimuli. Moreover, most decisions between stimulus and response are influenced by learned outcomes of prior decisions made in response to similar stimuli, however consciously or subconsciously we consider those previous scenarios. Similarly, I think most stimuli we are exposed to comes as a result of the decisions that we make, directly or indirectly. In other words, whether we realize it or not, I think what we call “human nature” tends to be a rapid, self-reinforcing cycle of sensory experience and responsive action.

At a fundamental level, this belief drives much of my philosophy of life, which is to strive for diversity of experience in order achieve my goals of being the smartest, happiest, kindest, most informed, empathetic, and successful version of myself. I don’t believe any of these attributes have an end state which can be achieved, but rather each is vector along which I continue to move, one experience at a time, hopefully forward not backward.

Along those lines, I actively try to break my model of thinking and disprove this belief, so if you think my perspective is totally flawed, or just wish to share your own, I’d love to hear from you: info@giles.vg.

The technicals

This blog is powered by Jekyll, a static site generator written in Ruby, and uses a custom theme developed by myself with the help of Tailwind CSS, a fantastic utility-first CSS framework. It is hosted on GitHub Pages, deployed automatically via GitHub Actions, and most of my posts I write in Vim, a highly configurable text editor for nerds like myself. The domain is registered with iwantmyname, a domain registrar with great service and support based in New Zealand. The newsletter is powered by MailChimp.