A New Direction

One-Year Anniversary

At the end of 2017, I left my role as part-owner of an IT consulting firm to take an in-house engineering manager role at a local software company. I have been in my new role as a manager for almost one year now. My employer affords me many of the amenities and perks that I used to enjoy when I was self-employed, so I do not feel like I lost too much. The biggest adjustment so far is I have not spent as much time doing actual technical work. I spend at around half of my time performing my management duties, and with the remaining time I get to do some DevOps engineering work.

In a way, I get to experience the best of both worlds. I still continue to work on my technical skills, both at work and on personal projects at home, but I do not get to spend as much time in the trenches as I used to do. So far, I like being a manager and I plan on sticking with it. It has its own set of challenges, and I look forward to learning and doing more in the coming year. I am still a developer at heart, so I would like to stay close to the engineering side of the business.

The Blog

Focus Shift

My overall blogging output has been way down since I stopped the “Distributed Weekly” list back in 2013. I think I have wasted more time feeling guilty about not blogging as I have actually writing articles. I am at a crossroads where I need to make a decision about whether or not I wish to continue having this blog. I have never had any sort of advertisements or other financial support for this blog. While it is not overly expensive, there is no sense in spending money to host my blog if I am not going to keep it updated.

2019 will be the year where I make the hard decision. If I cannot keep a reasonable posting schedule through the first half of this year, it will be time to retire the blog. I have an idea to create a weekly journal around a combination of interesting links I have seen, and new things I have learned. I am hoping this will give me new material to blog about, and an incentive to write the articles.

The Alternative

If I am unable to maintain a regular schedule, my plan is to archive the blog in my GitHub account. The source of my blog articles are stored as Markdown files, so they should render as-is in the GitHub web UI. If I am feeling motivated, I will attempt to deploy the rendered output using GitHub Pages. Either way, the articles themselves will be preserved on the off chance somebody other than myself wants to view them.

The first of the new journal articles should appear within the next week or so. If not, then it should be easy to see which direction this blog will go. Thanks for reading.