Welcome to the blog

It’s 2023, and that means it’s the year of the blog! Or at least, that’s what I’ve agreed it will be, with the following terms:

I commit to publishing a blog post, usually of a technical nature, every two weeks on Sunday, starting January 15th, 2023
Blogs can come early, purely for scheduling flexibility
There’s no minimum word count for a post, but the honor system I’m maintaing for myself is that I won’t post something inherently wasteful
I’m sharing this commitment with Quinten Palmer, who will also be posting biweekly! You can find his posts here, go check them out!

Why do this? A few reasons:

Writing is a valuable part of being a technical worker, and this commitment will give me an avenue and a responsibility to practice my writing
I’m working on a side project, a SaaS bartender application that I’ll be introducing more fully next time, and this blog will serve as an avenue to discuss that project and its development
As I’ve grown in my career, I’ve moved away from creative work for most of my workday. My side project, and this blog, will hopefully fill a creative hole that I feel building in my heart.

What will the main content of this blog be? It varies! Initially, my side project barkeep will be the inspiration. Barkeep is a pretty basic rails app, but I’ve found real challenges and learnings in in building, deploying, and managing it, as well as the personal challenges of striving to make progress of any kind on a side project while working a full time job.

Down the line, I have every intention of broadening the scope of this blog. Technology will almost always be a focus, but that umbrella covers a lot of potential topics, and I can’t promise we won’t branch out even further than that. Professionally, I’ve been growing as a manager over the last two years, and everything involved in that career change is a wealth of potential blog posts in the future. Expect future posts on Rails, FE frameworks, team processes, devops, cocktails, the list goes on!

Last but not least, I welcome feedback of all forms. Please email me with any thoughts you have as you read these posts. Perhaps it’s rose-tinted glasses, but I envy the days of the younger internet, where people created and shared their content with no inherent desire to have an audience, but rather to scratch some basic desire to create and commune with others. So, email me! I promise I’ll respond, and perhaps we can form a little community of our own someday.

Next week’s post: Forever 1% Better