Hello World

Hello, and thanks again for visiting my blog! Before we get started, I’d like to establish some ground rules…

Who am I?

That’s a tricky question. Not trying to be philosophical or anything, but identity is complicated. It’s always felt weird to me that (as Americans), the go-to introduction is “I’m an X role at Y company”.

Aren’t we more than our 9-5’s?

We have hobbies and fears and dreams and much more. I’m still figuring out who I am, and maybe you are too. But, if you’d like to read more about my background, the About page is a good place to start. And, as you may have already gathered, I’m a software developer by trade.

Why the website?

At this point, I’ve been online for most of my life. I’ve spent most of that time as a lurker, passively consuming the content of others, but never really creating my own. This is a common phenomenon, so much so that it has been described as the “1% rule”; only a small handful of users create the posts that the rest of us enjoy on a daily basis.

I’ve been aware of this quality in myself for quite some time. In fact, I built this blog over a year ago, at the end of 2020. But it’s sat empty all this time. I think much of that stems from a crippling fear of being wrong on the internet.

That was pretty silly, on my part.

No one can completely avoid mistakes, that’s only human! It’s also doing myself a disservice, as the potential to learn and improve is much greater when you let the world “check your math”. This idea is known as “Learn in Public”, popularized by @swyx.

And it’s not just Shawn, many of the people I follow have extolled the power of this methodology.

So I guess that’s the disclaimer: I don’t have all the answers, and I’ll never claim to be always right. The stuff here is based on the knowledge I have at the time, and I reserve the right to edit or change things as I learn more. Progress over perfection.

What can you expect?

If all of that sounds good to you, here’s what you can expect content on:

Anything that interests me

Incredibly vague, right? Well, I have a lot of ideas for posts, such as:

• How I built this site w/ Next.js & Tailwind
• Why I use a split, mechanical keyboard
• What’s the deal with web3 anyways?
• How to make great epoxy tables
• The pitfalls and shortcomings of Infrastructure-as-Code

It’s pretty tough for me to come up with one or two categories that work for all of that (if you have ideas, feel free to tweet them at me!). So instead, no promises other than sharing what I’m learning about.

Wrapping up

This year, instead of setting goals and spending the entire year trying to achieve them, I’m trying something different:

Writing is one of the habits I’ve decided to focus on. I’m hoping that by sharing what I’m learning, I can reach a better understanding and maybe help others along the way. So cheers to 2022, let’s see where we end up!