Catch-Up Post

This post is a catch-up post to explain the purpose of this website, and how I got to this point. Going forward, I intend to post whatever is going on with development of this website here.

The intent of this site is to provide a landing place for anybody looking into me as a potential hire, where they could view work I had done and see engagement with software and the industry in an ongoing way. And to learn something about me beyond what's in my CV. I thought it would be a good place to showcase:

• Personal projects
• Code katas
• Design katas

With the design katas in particular, I see an opportunity to showcase the things an employer might want to know about a prospect: how do they think about design? How do they communicate ideas to technical and non-technical stakeholders? How do they make decisions? To be sure, this is an area where I have significant room for growth, and the hope is that the work done for this site will serve as much for learning and practice as demonstration.

I started a project a little while ago to help me mitigate some of the things in GMail that I find to be shortcomings. (That project isn't finished, but the progress will be shared here when I get back to it).

While I was working on that, I knew I should be documenting the work. What I'm selling isn't the product, but the process, and the organization. I'm not selling the projects I build, I'm selling how I build projects. I wasn't really making the most of the project I was working on until I could say I was doing that.

For that, I needed a place to document the work. Setting up this personal showcase space has always been on my agenda, but I figured I needed to make it a priority to help with my job search.

I already had a personal domain set up. I was using it for email forwarding -- to give me a professional email address distinct from my personal one, without also having to manage separate Google accounts (with separate billing, subscriptions, etc.). I had experience using Docusaurus, and publishing it via GitHub pages; I maintained a "notes" repository at Intuit, both for organizing my own thoughts as I worked on something, and also for sharing out certain things. Also, part of what I want to showcase is well-organized documentation, so these things are a natural fit.

To be sure, I have a lot still to do here. But I think I've got things to a point where I need to start worrying about content as much as about my repositories. People can get here from my LinkedIn profile now, so there better be something here for them to see, even if it's not really any projects (beyond the site itself) just yet.

Hence this catch-up post and getting this blog going.

I'll post a couple more times today, about decisions I've already made, and about what's coming next for this site. Then the intent is to update this periodically with my thoughts and decisions related to the development of this page.

Thanks for visiting!