Garden of Thoughts | SherryAnalytics | July 4, 2026
Sub-title: A Fourth of July note from my desk, between the barbecue and the fireworks.
It's the Fourth of July, and before the fireworks start tonight I'm doing what I apparently do on holidays now: fiddling with my blog.
This week I spent an embarrassing number of hours getting a little preview image to show up when I share a post on LinkedIn. I wrote a Python script, learned more about Open Graph tags than I ever planned to, and lost one round to LinkedIn's cache before winning the next. None of it was anyone's job. Nobody asked for it. That's exactly why I enjoyed it.
Today's holiday is about independence, and I won't pretend my little blog is anything historic. But I've noticed the word means something real to me at this small scale too. This site is plain HTML files in a repository I control, built by scripts I can read line by line. Even my AI assistant's memory of our work together is just a folder of markdown files on my own laptop — I can open them, edit them, delete them.
Nothing here depends on a platform's permission or survives at a vendor's pleasure. If every tool I use disappeared tomorrow, I'd still have my files, and I'd still know how it all works. In a week when I fought a cache owned by someone else's platform, that felt worth appreciating.
So that's my small version of the holiday: work that belongs to me, understood all the way down.
Happy Fourth of July. 🇺🇸 Now, about those fireworks.
Signoff: Independence, at my scale: my files, my scripts, my weird little projects.
Idea, outline, and argument: mine. I used Claude to help tighten the prose.