Is this yet another hipster homepage for a backend dev having an existential crisis and considering going into baking and/or brewing? Maybe. Collection of navel gazing drivel? Most likely. Bit of yelling into the void? Almost certainly. Quite honestly I don't expect anybody to read this, and may actually be slightly embarrassed if anybody did.
I was never one for surfing the web in the 90s. Just clicking around blogs and finding random cool corners of the internet, reading MySpace pages, hanging out on forums - none of that really resonated for me. What I always wanted from the internet is to be able to find things. What does this obscure Java compiler error mean? How do I get my laptop's modem to work in OpenSUSE? I didn't get the internet until Google solved that problem for me. And that is all the internet was for me. Oh, email and downloading drivers was a thing. I eventually got into YouTube and a bit of online gaming. But "the internet" was never an activity for me.
However - every now and again though I run into a fascinating blog about things I never realised would be interesting and just consume the whole thing in a month. Not blogs in general, but a blog, by a person, usually about one thing.
Why am I writing this?
I have a career in tech. So I use the internet for all the usual things like being able to shop online, communicate with anybody I need, work from home, look up whatever I need to know, do banking, pay bills. That is a huge chunk of like and I get a lot of value from it. But it isn't really different from the value I get out of owning a car or living in a house with electricity and running water. Those are all fantastically useful pieces of infrastructure - but that is exactly what they are: Infrastructure. They have a job and they are supposed to do that job while being largely invisible.
Which is a long way of saying that I have wanted a blog for as long as blogs have been a thing. I have created a few blogs using various platforms, but never written anything. Having a blog is not useful in and of itself. And I can't define the intended value proposition of this page. Its value can only come from the content I put on it. It has no features that don't exist on Blogger or Wordpress or Ghost. The layout is not as nice as Medium. Hell, I can't even put pictures in posts yet. And I don't have any earth shattering revelations to share with the public. I actually don't even know what I will end up writing about.
I do know that I want to create something and share it. I don't have hundreds of hours to sit down and build a SaaS company. But I can write some words - so maybe spending a few minutes here and there putting down some words will let me contribute something so some conversation I care about.
Maybe I have just read too many blogs say you are not thinking unless you are also writing. Life is complicated and many decisions are not clear. I have a habit of backing away from things that are ambiguous, so maybe breaking down the process of thinking into little chunks of text I can throw at GitHub will make it more tractable. And having a record of my research and reasoning to share with people may actually be useful in some way. Just don't expect me to solve the meaning of life, the universe and everything. I'm not all that smart and I am likely to give up on any line of reasoning before I get anywhere.
What can you expect to find here?
Posts on this blog will be in draft a lot. I need to get more comfortable with regularly delivering things that are not perfect. So I'm not going to do anything fancy with branches and hidden draft posts. Just going to work on master and push out as I make changes. Those changes will be changed again. Things that are in draft have a DRAFT tag in as many places as make sense to me.
Some posts will be me thinking through something that is causing an issue in my life. These will be me reading whatever I can get my hands on and trying out whatever looks promising. They will likely stay in draft until I get a decent handle on the issue or give up on solving it.
Some posts will be about learning things. Programming topics, baking, brewing, gardening, whatever takes my fancy. I'll link to the places I learned from and post my results. Or something. I'll figure it out when it happens.
Likely there will be just random things that strike my fancy was well. I like reading, so there will no doubt be lists of books.
What this is not
There will be no expert opinions on here. I don't know much and I won't pretend otherwise.
I'm not building a brand.
This is not a 4 hour work week project that is intended to become a stream of income in the future.
There won't be a coherent theme and a regular schedule of content tailored to my growing audience.
This is not a marketing site for a book I'm writing or a course I'm developing.
Why should you read this?
Honestly, you probably shouldn't. I have an itch to write some things and post it somewhere. Chances are that I just wanted to set up a blog to see if I can get the wiring to work. Now that it is done and I don't need to mess with the infrastructure any more there is a high chance that I will lose interest and let AWS collect $1 a month for a few years before I delete the whole thing.