A full year after starting this blog I finally decide to get serious about it.

About a month ago I read a great article on non-monetary capital—things like your skills, relationships with others, and your reputation. All those things that can’t be bought, that you can’t attach a monetary value to. The article argues it’s better for your career to work on things you can show others, whether that’s contributing to open source projects outside of work, or having work with results visible to the public. Without that, how is someone to know you can do what you claim? It was with that thought in mind that I began revisiting this blog.

I put this site together roughly a year ago. I chose a static blog generation tool called Jekyll for the ease with which you can get something up and running as well as my familiarity with the Ruby programming language, which Jekyll is written in. For the layout I chose Minima, one of the bog-standard themes basically available out of the box. Its sense of minimalism appealed to me. For hosting, I threw it up on GitHub Pages; I already had a presence there (as every good little developer does), and it allowed me to host this site for free.

Over the next year, however, and other than the odd dependency-related update, I left this site basically untouched. Laziness and procrastination were the biggest culprits of course, but I think perhaps I was also fighting, and still am to some extent, a sense of self-consciousness. Self-consciousness both toward an endeavor a part of me refuses to see as anything but an obvious cry for attention (to whit, blogging and social media in general), and the self-consciousness of perfectionism we often feel when putting something out on display.

I’ve spent far too much of my life in analysis. In thinking and worrying rather than doing. Analysis as a way of putting off decisions. As a way of putting off results. I’m far, far better at this than I used to be, but it hasn’t been an easy journey. We all know change is hard, and there’s a part of you that fears your new habits are only temporary. That you’ll slip back into your old ways, leaving all your work undone and lying in pieces around you. But as is often the case, I make a mountain from a molehill. There’s no secret to getting things done. You just put fingers to keyboard and write the damn thing.

So in that spirit of just getting things done, I’ve decided to reopen this blog. As I stated above, the obvious hope is the articles and notes I write can in some way contribute to my career through creating a presence for myself on the web. It will also help to improve my writing, and it will serve as a test lab for trying out new design ideas and improving my understanding of CSS as I continue to rip up the original theme and make this place my own. But in addition, and perhaps more importantly than all that, it’ll stand as a middle finger to any self doubt I might still have about not being able to finish things or to see them through. And—who knows?—I might learn a thing or two along the way. At the very least, I hope not to be boring. But no promises.