Hello again, world!

I once told a friend about a Xanga blog I was running at the time, and she just laughed and said, “You and your websites!”

I was stunned. I never thought of myself as owning a website before. I managed profiles (at that time) on Xanga (since abandoned), Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn (hadn’t heard of Twitter yet), but I always thought owning a real personal website was either too expensive or too much work.

Fast-forward a few years, and my life has now brought me to a point where I feel it is too expensive not to run my own site. Here are my top 5 reasons why:

5. Basically, I’m a developer now

My official title at Ludlum Measurements, Inc. is “Project Engineer”, which means I take primary responsibility for the development and production of new and existing products assigned to me. That said, what I end up actually doing for 40+ hours a week is a mix of desktop application and firmware development.

In today’s job climate, it’s best to keep abreast of new opportunities as they arrive. After all, people who change jobs every two years earn more than those who stay put. Most employers of developers, especially web developers, would expect a potential new hire to maintain a personal website.

4. I’m already hosting and maintaining other sites

Through Walke Designs, I’m already managing other web pages. So far, these are all WordPress sites (like this one). Our service provider is very accommodating and inexpensive (thanks JustHost!), and as long as you don’t do anything funny like try to install Laravel, NodeJS, and Rails 4 (guilty), they allow a lot of storage and bandwidth at a flat rate. Thus, the only cost to me to run my own site is the domain name, which is really very inexpensive compared to anything at all. You can barely get milk and eggs without spending $15 now. Compared to what I spend every month for my smartphone data plan, it’s basically free.

3. I like to rant

Technically, I could log in to the Walke Designs blog and post whatever I want. However, I don’t think it’s appropriate to use a business site to talk about personal issues, projects, or political thoughts. I think about those subjects a lot, and while I feel free to express those thoughts on Facebook and Twitter, the blog format is better suited for collecting and sharing these thoughts in a coherent, non-invasive way.

2. I like to code

Honestly, I feel a bit ashamed to be relying on a “batteries included” framework like WordPress to publish my blog. I feel like I should be able to code the whole thing in PHP-HTML-JS-CSS (JustHost pretty much just likes PHP on the server side, not my favorite). However, as I was sketching out how I would design the site, I realized that pretty much everything I wanted on the backend would just be replicating what WordPress already does for free. With that in mind, I decided to publish the main site the easy way and add flair later my customizing themes and adding JS modules to individual pages when appropriate. This site will be the perfect playground for that kind of experimentation, as it won’t interfere with the professional sites I host, but it will still be live and public. In other words, I like the pressure, but not too much pressure.

1. I want to give back

I’m continually inspired by my coding heroes who blog, including personal acquaintances like Bryan Hughes (@nebrius) and slightly more public figures like Charles Max Wood (@cmaxw) and Saron Yitbarek (@saronyitbarek). Saron and her CodeNewbie group are especially inspiring, because she’s been programming for many fewer years than I have, but she’s already blown me away in terms of making a real impact in industry.

I feel like the common thread among these individuals is that they each decided at some point in their careers to make an effort to connect with other people who were interested in writing code by sharing their own thoughts and experiences. I get so much from listening to Charles Max Wood’s 10 or so podcasts every week (most notably Ruby Rogues and Javascript Jabber), and they would never exist if the panelists on those shows all waited until they were millionaires with several decades of professional experience under their belts before they joined the conversation. Yes, some of the panelists have been around the block a few times, but not all, and the diversity of the panels is a big part of the value of those podcasts.

So, this is me, looking to do my part to join the conversation after a few years of relative silence. Me and my websites, right?