Last updated on 2019/09/26
In getting things up and running here, I have spent quite a bit of time thinking, reading and planning over the past week. I know that I want this site to be a place where I can share my thoughts and ideas. I know that I want to pay homage to people, ideas, books, and sites that I respect and that have influenced my Engineering growth. So since yesterday after finishing my initial welcome post, today the goal is to focus on building the site.
After spending time setting up some basics – picking a template and adding a generic image on the main page and some generic main navigation links from the default theme – now it is time to start customizing! Unbeknownst to me as I started this effort, this opened up a deep, dark rabbit hole. I have now identified one of the biggest pitfalls of my own process – getting sidetracked while researching. It started out simply: there is a blog post that I remember finding about 6-7 years ago talking about scratching an itch for development and I think it also defined programmers/engineers. I loved that article and used to refer to it often as it contained a lot of knowledge that I agreed with and wanted to incorporate into my daily life as an Engineer.
There is just one problem – over time I have lost the link. The good news is that I think I remember the site it was on. The bad news is that the site has 286 pages worth of blog posts to choose from. Guess whose stubbornness led them to paging through ALL 286 pages of the site? Yup – that was me. As I went through I found tons of awesome posts and ideas and links so I started firing them off to review later, and at the end of 286 pages here is what one of my chrome browsers looks like:
I feel like the guy in the site logo right now. So much for efficiency…
But it is not all bad. In order to re-focus I jumped over to the posts sections and started writing this post. I also started preparing the main navigation links (as of Sept 2019 at the top of the blog) and will definitely be adding Mr. Atwood’s Coding Horror blog to the Things I Like – Websites & Links section.
While this may seem like a lot of stuff to go through – and it is – it has helped me quite a bit. I am always trying to learn, build, and add to what I know and what I am working on. This has helped to focus on some short-term targets:
- Knowing what my next post topic is – I have already generated about 2 dozen initial targets as placeholders in the posts section and one of them just got bumped to the top. So keep an eye out for “Beg, Borrow, or Steal (or Pirate)”. I want to address up front my thoughts on having a blog that will be similar to other things that are out there and to post my own thoughts on topics and technology that other people have already thought through
- Creating the ‘Things I Like’ section – Draft saved… section pages created… back to the draft. Check!
- Setting targets for myself. One of the posts on Coding Horror talked about success in blogging. So I need to set some short term goals for myself in an upcoming post.
- Attempt to define why I am doing this. These would be longer-term goals for myself and the site.
- Take a deep breath and realize that I can’t do everything at once. This may be the biggest takeaway that I have after reviewing 286 pages of blog posts. They are great, fun posts about anything and everything. Some are definitely dated due to the onward march of technology (for example: The World’s Slowest Windows XP System) but this is a 15 YEAR OLD blog with amazing information and relevant insights and thousands of posts. I am in awe right now and can only dream of making a 1 year anniversary post, let alone writing one for 10- or 15-year anniversary. So moving slow and deliberately is definitely the way to go here.
Thanks for reading!
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