What’s up everyone…
It’s been an interesting week for me. I started a new job. With that new job comes a pretty steep learning curve on multiple fronts. So it’s been a busy and interesting first week.
Perhaps though the biggest change isn’t so much in what I do on week days but rather how my thinking about life and the future continues to evolve. Specifically right now I’d like to share a bit about how my thoughts about blogging have changed over the past seven years.
In case you haven’t noticed, it’s been pretty quiet on the blog lately. If you were following the blog during my time at The Iron Yard you might remember that I tried to post almost every week day.
The reason that I blog has changed a number of times over the past couple of years. When I first started it was simply a way for me to be able to share photos that I was taking with my new camera. At some point it morphed into a way for my family to keep up with what was going on in my life while I was working in Guatemala… more recently the reason for my blogging was to make sure I didn’t forget about things (such as my time at The Iron Yard).
In some ways I guess I’ve always been creating an “identity” online. Subconsciously I want to be sure that when you type my name into Google, you would find my blog. Why is that important? A few reasons.
Firstly, and part of the reason that I’m not a super fan of Facebook, Twitter and social media in general, is that “they” ultimately own my content. If someone searches for me and comes to my website/blog, I own that domain. It’s me. It’s real. I can change it. I can change how it looks. I own my data.
Secondly, as I was looking for a job I wanted to be clear about “my story,” who I am as a developer, the struggles I’ve had, the opinions I’ve formed… stuff like that. If I was going to hire someone, anyone, the first thing I would do is go to Google and type their name in. In some ways my blog was meant, for the past eight months or so, to give prospective companies a clearer idea of who I am and what I can do.
Finally, part of the reason I love the internet is the amount of helpful information that can be found on it. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve searched for “how to do something” or for a review on some “thing” and been led to an article that ultimately answered my question. If what I’ve experienced in life can help someone else, I want to make that possibility available to them.
Going forward I want to continue to blog on something of a semi regular basis. So just for my personal aspirations and also so you know what’s going on, I’m going to try to write something here once each week (or so). Maybe more often. Maybe less often. Content will vary.