Milhouse icon deprecated

Between Christmas and New Years I normally update a couple of sites and servers that I maintain, including this personal blog. For this site, I update Gatsby.js and its dependencies (no major version this year), the WordPress instance that powers its headless CMS as well as its plugins.

This year, during my yearly update cycle, I also decided to leave behind my Milhouse avatar, which was this site’s favicon for many years.

“Milhouse” was a childhood nickname that I resurrected as a professional persona when I started working full time. I started to make this Simpsons character my profile picture in Slack, JIRA and other services. If you’ve ever worked with me you probably know that Milhouse = Pietro. But today I put Milhouse to rest, at least for a while, partially because I don’t wear glasses anymore, but mostly because in our remote working world I figured that having your actual photograph be your profile picture is more helpful to new hires and colleagues you’ve never met in person.

I reserve the right to bring Milhouse back in the future, although at that point it might be more fitting to come back as Milhouse’s dad.