New Year, New Website
I've been meaning to build a personal website for a while, so in the scheme of new years resolutions, I decided to stop procrastinating and just ship it.
Unlike most Engineers or developers who build their websites to house their portfolio for prospective employees or beady-eyed recruiters, my reasoning was far simpler (and arguably far more selfish). I'm not trying to find a new job (in fact I adore my current job!) and I'm not trying to sell you a product or service. In contrast, I don't even need there to be a "you" - this website is that selfish that I don't mind if it has an audience or traffic what-so-ever at this stage.
So why have I decided to secure my microscopic corner of the internet you ask? Purely for self-development. I would like to start keeping track of my progression, my thoughts, my plans; to force myself to remain accountable to my goals; to have a history of my development and one day (down the track) to potentially help others.
To achieve this, I created three distinct blogs within this singular site. Yes, I have heard of tags and categorisation, but I'm the kind of guy who has 9 bank accounts because I preach separation of concerns. Each for their own.
The first of these blogs are designed to house my ramblings (much like this post). I can be quite a scatter-brain. I work on a lot of different projects concurrently. I have a lot of ideas, a lot of things I want to solve and I can get lost amongst them all in dreamers land. I'm the kind of person that can be frustrating to have coffee with as I'll bounce from idea to idea often in jaggeder succession with minimal reference to a prior point. (Apologies to anyone who felt I was a million miles away whilst we were catching up. I'm working on it.) I decided it would be nice to start writing some of these thoughts down, perhaps in more literate detail than the scribbles found in my Leuchtturm1917 dot-grid. The Musings blog will be my rudimentary MVP at attempting to make my thoughts slightly more coherent. The goal? Multi-faceted. Firstly, to practice articulating concepts in such a way that can be understood with minimal prior knowledge of the subject matter. Secondly, to force myself to focus on a particular notion long enough to write a couple of paragraphs about it without rapidly digressing to the next topic. Finally, (and simply) to keep track of some of my thoughts to revisit them later.
The second of these blogs is a reading list. Nothing fancy. Just a collection of books that I've read. At some point in time, I may expand it to book's that I'd like to read, but for now, that list can stay in my book depository shopping cart. The reason behind a book list is simple accountability and goal tracking. I want to read more. The amount of wisdom that is so simply accessible in the pages of books is in-comprehensive. Tapping into this knowledge bank is a focus of mine and this year I've set a quantifiable goal of 52 books. (I'm already behind.) Realistically, to achieve this target I may have to resort to a couple of novels here and there - not that there's anything wrong with novels, I could probably do with reading a few more, it's been several years.
The final blog? Programming guides and tech thoughts. This may be the only section of this website that could genuinely bring some value to a visitor if they're an aspiring developer or someone looking to get into the software industry. Concurrently, it could be something that dreamers or bookworms couldn't care less about; hence, 3 separate blogs. This section is still relatively fuzzy in my mind and joining the 'developer' section of the interwebs is more of a social experiment at this stage. However, education is very dear to me and is something that I believe is incredibly flawed in our modern society (a blog post for another time). Consequently, I would like to attempt to develop some guides to teach people how to begin writing software and share some knowledge regarding what they can expect and the things they might come across in the world of tech.
There you have it, a new website for my ramblings. Designed to keep me accountable, store a history of my progression, keep track of my reading and hopefully teach someone to code. The final key reason for this website was that of time management and side hustles. Forcing myself to do more activities and take up a responsibility that I don't need to do (that doesn't pay me) requires me to be creative with my time management. Likewise with my side hustles and projects. I work too much - I'm a certified workaholic and I need to find a better balance between my job and the other things I want to achieve. I won't be faking any dates on blog posts, hence I'll have to make time to post regular updates. Wish me luck.