I just started blogging again! I blogged weekly for about two years over at willmurphyscode.net, which is a wordpress.com site that I created right after I decided to take a job in software engineering and right before I actually started working in the field. I’ll leave that site up; there’s a bit of good content over there, and also a few posts that I would cringe to read now, thinking, “Oh no, someone gave a first year software engineer the password to a Wordpress account and he has decided to Tell the World About Objects.”

I’m a bit farther along in my career now (6.5 years vs -0.25 years), and I think a few things changed:

1. I don’t want to be on that particular blog. That was my newbie project. It was fun but it feels like it’s fizzled.
2. I’m just less certain of things. I want to strike a more open, less dogmatic tone from the word go.
3. I just don’t want to use wordpress.com any more. I want to type some markdown, type git push, and go on with my life.

So this is a brand new blog. It’s Hugo, AWS Amplify, and Skeloton CSS. Skeleton seems to be abandoned (last commit in 2014, right before I started the last blog), and is MIT licensed, so I’ve just pulled it straight into the new blog and will serve a modified version of it, but it did save me the trouble of writing the CSS entirely from scratch.

I think when I wrote the last goal, I was convinced that I needed to build a strong personal brand and become some huge thought leader or something in order to have a real career. And the blog helped a bit - I have definitely used it in job applications before, and gotten that job - but I’m convinced that this reason for starting is why the last blog was a bit off. I was writing to impress, and I should have been writing to teach and learn.

I’ve got a lot of ideas bouncing around in my head, some of them tech-related and some of them not, and one of my main goals is to have very low friction for putting up new content.

So anyway, hello world, again! It’s been a while. Hopefully we can learn something together.

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