Hello World

I’ve been working in tech since 2009 and have been messing with computers since getting my hands on one as a kid and bricking it on the first day while messing around in MS-DOS.

This is also the third or fourth time I’ve tried to start a blog. I’m not great at writing. My process usually relies on a manageable mix of anxiety and procrastination as I develop my ideas before throwing something on page. However, my roles and responsibilities over the last few years have increasingly focussed on writing documentation for design systems and RFC documents. I’ve noticed myself improving bit by bit and I want to keep going at it.

So why try again with this blog? I’ve got a few reasons…

Our industry is going through a difficult period in line with the current economic climate. It’s hard to know when it will pass or if it’s indeed as bad as I think it is. Watching the situation develop through the lens of my Twitter and LinkedIn feeds can be tense at times. Doubling down on my personal development and online presence is proving to be a healthy alternative to doomscrolling. I’ve been doing more research, getting involved with open-source projects and tweeting along the way. Writing longer pieces seems like the next logical step while I work myself up to public speaking.

I’m doing a bunch of research into tools and technologies that may not be immediately useful to my day job and I want to try and document my learnings somewhere. I’m particularly inspired by Shawn Wang ’s piece on learning in public and would love to try writing more with that goal in mind. At the time of writing this post, I’m working a lot with Benthos and I have been investigating CUE , Temporal , Astro and vanilla-extract . They’re all super exciting projects and I’d love to talk about them at some point.

Most importantly, I just want to write more. As I get better at it, I can organise and share my thoughts better. I’m not aiming to push out content frequently but, when I do, I’m going for “useful”. Not to mention, these posts might very well outlive my Twitter threads given how things are going with that site!