Who I am

This blog has had as many incarnations as a cat has lives. Some of you who have been here before may be confused by the new format since originally this was a technical blog that focused on development. It got good traffic and had some neat content but it was difficult to get motivated about writing articles. I work all day on code and as much as I am passionate about it I often didn’t want to spend my personal time writing about it. I have a lot of interests in my life and code is only one of them, albeit the most profitable one. If you are here looking for my old technical articles I apologize – they are gone and I have no plans to archive them anywhere. Everything is long obsolete now. Funny how technology is like that. This is not to say that I still don’t write those articles. I just host them elsewhere now. I had some other blogs too, one in particular that focused on politics and atheism but it was a pain in the ass maintaining multiple blogs and I found myself spending more time worrying about which blog to post to than writing the posts. I just want to write what’s on my mind now and I don’t want it to be complicated.

When I was a child I decided that I was going to be writer when I was older. I used to write novels that spanned hundreds of pages when I was in middle school. It was mostly science fiction and high fantasy. I still keep my writing in a box in the closet and every once in a while I burn a few hours reliving some of those memories. It’s an experience that’s both wonderful and embarrassing. The imagination was there and there was even the spark of personal style but as you would expect from the writings of an adolescent it lacked something extremely important… life experience. There was a point during my teenage years when I decided that to put down the pen and come back to it after I had lived a decade or two. In the interim I decided to become a software developer.

I take great pride in that most life goals that I have set for myself I have managed to hit. I can recall a night I spent hanging out with my mother at the beginning of my senior year of high school when she point blank asked me what did I want to do with my life. I had been struggling with high school, socially, so naturally I was extremely unhappy. I want to be a computer programmer, was what I told her without even taking a breath. It was something I had become passionate about in the last 2 years and I was convinced that I wanted to make it my career. Maybe it was my conviction or maybe it was that I had chosen an industry that was exploding at the time and held ultimate promise but she basically gave me the green light to pick myself up out of my rut and get on with what I wanted to do. This meant leaving high school to start a more useful curriculum in college. I was thrilled by this and immediately took flight. Within 3 years I had my college degree in hand and I was working on my next goals, the largest one being to marry my best friend. Somewhere in there was a goal involving a Lexus by the time I was 30 but due to economic circumstances beyond my control some things had to wait.

Fast forward a decade or two and I find myself at the peak of my career as a software developer. I manage a growing team focused on maintaining one of the largest WordPress sites on the web. I sit here now looking back on my time since leaving high school and find that I can finally tap into a wealth of life experience. I feel that I can finally pick my pen back up and resume where I left off. My new goal is to write all the time. I am going to write as much as I possibly can. I suspect my friends and family on Facebook will be grateful that I have found a new outlet for my walls of text which I dump liberally onto unappreciative streams of food porn and canned opinions expressed through internet memes. I apologize to those of you who have found my opining insufferable and I hope that you were able to pick some insight out of my rants. I admit that I am a man of strong opinion. I do my best to build my opinions on a foundation of verifiable facts and I will likely continue to do so through this medium but sometimes there’s nothing to be done for people who want nothing to do with reality – or my interpretation of it. The realization I’ve known for some time is that social media is a useless medium for soapbox ranting and at best all I’ve accomplished is to uncover who agrees with me. This has been frustrating as it has always been my goal to flush out those who disagree with me and have them convince me of their view. I admit it – I love to debate. It seems no one else does.

So here I sit typing away on my laptop. I am a father, a husband, a son, a developer, a cat lover, a writer, a humanist, a science enthusiast, a reader, a gamer, a redditor, an asshole, and plenty of other things I’m sure. It’s unlikely I will have another job as a developer beyond the one I now hold so that means to me that I have reached the next phase of my life. Or maybe I’ve come full circle. Everyone spends the first couple of decades of their life figuring out who they are and my life was no exception. I was pretty confused up until about 28. I’ve had to make enough hard decisions by now and I know who I am now and I know what I want to do while I’m still on this planet. I’m going to start by picking up my pen. I’m going to tell you a story.