What is dead may never die, but rises again, harder and stronger.
It has been a long hiatus for me from the world of blogging. Last year (2016) I managed only a single meaningful post from a talk I gave at the South Dakota Code Camp. The year prior I managed a half dozen. In short, it’s been a long time since I started off in Radio Userland and posted frequent personal thoughts and ideas. In the meantime I’ve been quite active on Twitter and other social platforms; proof that like everyone else, they were sucking away energy that would have been used writing longform.
Beyond the social networks there is something else too; I’ve had a hard time with blogging tools. Static site generators are great - this blog is generated with Hugo - but gone are the days where things were simple. Where it was Radio, or Live Writer. I will take the effort of a generator over the bloat of Wordpress but it means that my markdown has to flow and I will need to keep looking up commands from the CLI.
But I’m back to write and meander into a point of view that will help me grow. You see, back when I was writing frequently, before audience and analytics, before email newsletter subscriptions and adsense dollars, I hoped that my little posts would be attractive to others but I wrote primarily for myself. There is something about having to express yourself in long form, to think about connecting dots into a train of thought that is longer than a tweet.
Last week I was fortunate enough to attend Google I/O and between waves of severe Imposter Syndrome and drinking from the firehose I realized the best way to try to keep up with the motley of savants there was to put myself in the open, to take the time to struggle through the old, new or useful, and to risk the programmer’s worst nightmare: the vulnerability of admitting what I don’t know.
So here is my attempt: to go beyond the tweet, to conquer the technology platform, and to grow in the open. I’m back, undead.