Hello and welcome to the new iteration of my personal blog.

I still have a few quality of life features to add, but at thw time of writing, most of the core functionality of what I am trying to achieve here is nearing completion. Expect a few changes if you happen to be reading this near the post date. In the meantime, I would like to write a little bit about this website and why I created it.

This is now the second iteration of a personal website that I have created and published. My last website was created circa 2017 and served much of the same purposes, but the website suffered from a few issues that I would like to address in a future blog post and retrospective. The short answer is that it was too complex, challenging to maintain, and distracted from the core purpose that motivated me to create a personal website. That purpose is to document my personal side projects as well as to have a place to take notes as I learn and further my skills in software engineering.

Since the creation of my very first website I have grown significantly as an engineer. I have now worked in the field for over 7 years now, coding primarily in Java creating high-throughput cloud-based applications and services. I have learned much in this time about how to create large, scalable, and maintainable software systems. I have deployed projects from scratch and watched them being utilized with millions of requests daily, and I have worked for Fortune 500 companies providing software for retail, telecom, security, and human resources. Throughout my time in the industry, I have learned an incredible amount, but I find myself going back and having to brush up quite often to remind myself of things that I have learned and accomplished. Having a place to document what I have learned will be a valuable tool to myself in the future, and I am doing so publicly with the hopes that somebody else might find it useful as well.

Another motivation for this website is to encourage my own growth in side projects while continuing to work full time as a Software engineer. I have found that being motivated to work on software outside of my full-time job to be challenging. It is quite hard to spend time staring at a terminal and lines of code after doing so for 40+ hours a week, but this has led to a feeling that I am missing something in my life. I believe that the missing feeling to be from my deep passion to explore and learn new technology as well as my desire to create something new just for the sake of doing so. I have always considered myself to be a creator, and this desire to create is a fundamental core to my being that I wish to exercise. Through this website I hope to feed that desire and allow it to flourish.

I hope that perhaps this website can encourage others to go create as well, or perhaps something that I learn and document can help someone in their own projects. I may be yelling into the void here, but if nothing else, I am providing a useful documentation and journal for myself. Life is short, go create something.