Here we go again

I swear this has to be my second or third attempt at blogging, every time writing a post or two and then giving up on it either out of boredom, getting occupied somewhere else, or both.

Why do you keep trying to?

That is a very good question disembodied voice, and one I’m still figuring out. Why do I have a draw to lengthy posted discussions when I could just condense my thoughts down and put them on twitter, or just tell a friend about it, I don’t know. And I think the answer is one, I really like the journey involved in going through a long post. There’s much more of a story to be told in them, even in the driest topics imaginable. And I like to believe those stories of mine are worth telling? If they aren’t, well at least it’s on my corner of the internet and not shoved in front of you by a social media feed. Sorry to anyone who has seen my 20 tweet long threads.

And second, I have a fascination with the work pipeline involved in content publishing. Writing software to blog obviously takes time away from blogging itself, but it’s fun exploring what it means to go from a comfortable writing workflow to something comfortable for readers to consume. And like every blog before it, this one is on a new, novel, hopefully better system. We’ll talk about it probably in a later post, as I write this I already want to rewrite shit.

Expanding on that second reason some more, there is something of a self damnation to it. I want to be able to write my thoughts down and share them, but I’m discontent with all of the content publishing pipelines out there. I then write a bunch of software to attempt to craft what I consider my dream pipeline, only to never achieve it and get burnt out, killing the blog.

This time, however, already feels a good bit better. I’m laying here on my couch, looking out the window into the glowing cityscape of a late night downtown Seattle, getting my thoughts down before bed after a long day at work. It’s meditative, I’ve lowered my barrier to entry all the way down to making sure my iPad is charged, and opening up Notion to brain dump. Whenever this is done, I can export it to Markdown and CSV and let my software process that into whatever format I need (that’s the rewrite I mentioned earlier).

So, that’s a lengthy way to say that I want to keep up with this, and I hope to deliver. The question however is now, what am I delivering?

The Rundown

Having this on my portfolio website presents an interesting conundrum. I should stay professional, talk about my field of work mostly, and have it be a showcase of how good of an engineer I am so that I can get hired by some loose concept of a company. But frankly, that’s bullshit. If you’re this far down into the post, you’re not a recruiter. If you are, you have proven me wrong and please skip to the tech section below for the parts you’re looking for. If you’re a coworker or family, hello and sorry in advance. If you’re a personal friend, hello and I love you. And if you’re anyone outside of those sets, welcome to my bed of chaos. Here you’ll find my ramblings on life, hobbies, and mostly a lot of “nerd shit”.

If you’re here for the software engineering

If you are in fact here for the tech, here’s my pitch to follow my work: I am a software engineer with a focus on novel, but practical solutions. Not to toot my own horn but I think my projects and interests fall into such a large breadth of topics that there’s something for everyone. Looking for web dev? I have projects that mixes modern web dev with diy internet of things and microservices. Looking for hardware dev? I am always looking for an excuse to boot up kicad and have bleeding edge experience with rust on a variety of microcontrollers. Looking for game dev? I have been on and off working on the same game for six years and there’s plenty of discussion to be had about it. It’s currently an off year if you’re curious, starting a job is hard.

If you’re here for literally anything other than code

Thank you for being here, because frankly it’s hard to talk tech sometimes when it’s your day job. I want this blog to be a discussion of what I love, including developing but also including photography, retro gaming, board games, design, and whatever thoughts I have swirling around. Will things always be excited and engaging? Probably not. Sometimes these posts will be self indulgent. To be honest, even as I’m writing this I can feel how much I need to put my thoughts on paper. I made a cross country move three months ago, first time living more than a few hours away from home, moving in solo, and basically having to immediately start work and pretend everything is okay. As my friends put it, I entered “sandbox mode”, I can do whatever I want and that’s very jarring after the education system. So, talking about the things I love, even to the unknown reader, keeps me in touch with myself and prevents me from being consumed by the capitalism machine that wants me to only care about money and productivity. Also if you don’t know me, expect a lot of anti-capitalism talk, just as a heads up. Shit’s fucked, btw.

A song to say goodbye

To end these posts, at least the rant posts, I want to share a song. It might be a song I listened to while writing this, it might be a song to reflect my mood, but I’ve found I can be very poor with words and music has always been there as a crutch to convey how I feel.

This time around, the song is my current ear worm. And maybe just a little, it’s title reflects not hesitating to try this all again.

If you’re seeing this, my pipeline worked and the second largest hurdle to blogging is complete. What’s the largest? Writing a second post. We’ll talk again soon, okay?