3 Years of Reading Pluralistic
After reading yesterday's Pluralistic, I realized a few parallels with Cory's reflection on the past three years of his current web-writing setup. I've experimented with many similar tools and concepts. I'm inspired to take that experimentation back up and reminded that writing for myself, however rough it ends up, is still worthwhile. More interestingly I realized that how I read the web has evolved in similar ways to Cory's writing.
My Forge and RSS Reading List
I continue to work on this site, either migrating old content or re-writing it to be more up to date.
Self Hosting Upgrade
I have been self hosting my own services for years. I originally started doing so to practice new skills early in my career, then increasingly for privacy by definitively owning my own data. Since I started I have added more services to enrich and control my online experience. I recently overhauled and upgraded how I self host after a few years of inertia. I am pretty happy with where my efforts led and thought I'd share a little more about what I did.
Migrating Content
You may have noticed more content showing up here on the new site. Some of it, like this post, is new, part of my effort to get back into regular posts. The rest is content from the old site that I have started migrating over to the new site.
New Site
Over the last few months, I have been working on my private servers to update them to more modern tools and to make them easier to manage.
Finding My Motivation as a Manager
Most of my career, I have been a software developer. Occasionally I have tried my hand at managing people. Up until my current job, my attempts at management have met with mixed success. There are a variety of reasons behind this and I want to share one of them. Motivation is important to my success. As a technologist, I had a good grasp on what motivated me and was able to consistently lean into it. In my past attempts at management, I didn't make the connection that those well understood motivations for a technologist didn't apply. Even with this understanding, I struggled.
Correction: Minor Technology Podcaster
The morning after each podcast release, I give the episode listen for quality and correctness. During my drive this morning, I cringed as I heard myself say, "minority technology podcaster" when talking about how I think of myself with regards to a broader point in the episode.
Back
A bit over ten months ago I said I needed to take a break. That was a year after I left my job at a think tank. I left that job due to burnout. After a year, I was still feeling burned out, specifically on technology and policy. The very subjects at the heart of this project. Writing and speaking about these subjects is demanding. It is rewarding, too, or I would not have spent a decade on them. But demanding, oh so demanding. Which is why I started The Command Line in the first place, to give myself the opportunity to dig into these topics far more deeply than I had been doing up to that point.
Taking a Break
The time has passed to admit that I am burned out on reading and writing about technology and technology policy.
A Different Ethos
I attended my first JavaScript conference last year, in May. Over all the experience was great. The talks were interesting, the venue was amazing, the programming was incredible well done, and there was plenty of time to meet and chat with other developers. One moment very early on stands out in my memory, though.