Late last night (early this morning?) I decided that it might be a good idea to start a blog. Like many decisions made in an overtired state in the middle of the night, I’m not sure whether this will turn out to be a good idea!
I’ve been looking for a project that would give me an excuse to play with some new technology. My job has become increasingly administrative as our team has more than doubled in size, so I’ve been trying to find ways to stay in touch with tech and keep my skills sharp. I’ve found that the problem with learning new techs is that unless I can play with them every day, I don’t retain much of what I learn. And my job is definitely not going to allow me to play with any project that regularly. So I thought, next best thing - I can write about what I’m learning. It’ll help me retain what I’m soaking in, and might be a useful reference for my future self to look back on.
Some of the things I’ve been playing with lately are Rails 4, the Evernote and Google APIs, and now the software to create this blog, Jekyll. I’ll also be looking at some high performance computing tools for work, like the Apache Spark platform. Hopefully, I’ll find interesting things to write about these topics as I dig in. I will also find things to say about the practice of IT team management, a topic which I’ve been exploring in depth over the past few years and the topic I’m most qualified to speak about at this point in my career.
Recently, during our annual review cycle at work, one of my employees asked “Who is the audience for this self-evaluation I’m writing?” My answer? “Mostly yourself.” I really believe that about self-evaluations (and maybe I’ll expand on that in a future blog post), and I think it’s true about this blog too. I’m not expecting an audience, but the act of writing will be helpful to me, and if anyone else finds what I have to say useful, then it’s a bonus.
So, if you’ve read this far, you’ve already exceeded my expectations! Thanks, and hopefully you enjoy the blog.