Starting Over Again

Blogging is something that I’ve attempted and failed numerous times over the past years decades. My first attempt at my own webpage happened in High School in 1996 with an Angelfire site. Later I moved onto Geocities along with the post-AOL crowd. Next came Angelfire, then a dynamic DNS setup pointing to a page hosted in my dorm room at college. For most of the 00’s I was radio silent while overseas. When I finally got back to the states I tried to get back into it, first on Facebook, then running my own static site on Bluehost. For the past five years I’ve been hosting static sites on AWS, which is where we are today.

I always wanted to blog. I’ve had an itch to write most of my life and even aspired to write my own book. But writing is a habit, it’s work. You have to commit to it or it just becomes another thing that you start and abandon. So that’s why we’re back here once again.

During the past few years I’ve thought to separate my “landing page” from my Blog. There’s no privacy reason for that, it just sounded like a good idea; in reality it’s premature optimization. If people want to get to know me, read my words, or just see the other platforms I’m on, they should only need to go to one place to do so. Time to retire all the clever domain names I’ve registered over the years and stick with one.

What I’m Writing About

My work and personal interests are closely aligned. I’m a builder, self-taught systems engineer, and journeyman coder who loves to tinker with things. I have a whole backlog of projects that I’ve been wanting to work on and COVID-19 has freed up more time in my life that was normally spent stuck in a car. I’m also going to write about being a father, about personal development, about trying to be a good human being. And technology, lots about that.

Above all, I want to be able to express myself and become a better writer. At my current job we have a heavy narrative culture. Ideas are rigorously interrogated to make sure that when we decide to act that we have a clear end-state and we minimize as many unknown-unknowns as possible. As I’ve been a participant in this new work culture my own writing has subtley improved, as has my speech. At 41 years of age, knowing that you can still improve yourself has been a welcome surprise.

What We Won’t Be Doing

This is less about self-promotion and more about emptying my mind. One of the principle barriers in my life to gettng things done is holding onto things in my own head. I have a prety good memory, so I can tuck away all sorts of to do’s. Over time this builds up into a wall of things to get done that I never get around to; the pebbles of turn into a mountain of procrastination. So writing about the things I’m doing necessitates doing things so this blog is also an attempt at getting off of my fourth point of contact.

I’ll probably post new articles on LinkedIn and Twitter, the two platforms that I think are least-bad of all social media, but that’s more to make sure that people read what I write. Beyond that, there’s going to be no SEO strategy, no marketing campaign, and I am definitely not interested in becoming an influencer (why is that even a thing?).

Closing

So, writing. That’s what we’re doing here. Putting words on the screen about the things that I do, the things I think and feel, and maybe even some experiments in technology as well. I can’t promise that it will be particularly good but this time it will be consistent. Once a week (at least) I’ll put something new up to share with the world.

P.S - I’ve also included an RSS feed to the site if you’d like to subscribe that way.