I am just sitting down from some chicken breasts in a favorite combination of Dijon, grapeseed oil, salt, pepper, onion, and lemon juice. This is go-to for my weekly meal prep, and I am going to be baking these suckers, while my girlfriend and I also cook another favorite recipe for Thai Basil Chicken. Somewhere in the middle of this prep, or before it, or honestly sometime in the past half a year I figured it’s about damn time I finally start that personal development blog.
I assume you, like me, have made no less than ten New Years resolutions centered around the idea of journaling, writing your memoir, or doing anything to cement your memories before they get eradicated by tomorrow’s concerns. I have had ups and downs in these efforts, wherein at best I may manage to string together a couple months of logging day-to-day activities until I fall back into my old ways.
Let’s pretend together for a second that this isn’t that. While I have generally missed the mark on my journaling goals, I have been successful in one of my resolutions this year. That resolution was to start elevating myself as a Software Engineer. In my nearly six years of developing software professionally I have learned a lot, but until semi-recently I wasn’t spending free time learning about what I wanted to learn about. It’s easy to get wrapped up in problems at work and learning what is needed there, but suffice to say we all need to find a way to develop professionally without slogging through things that are needed in the moment. It should be fun.
I could make a million excuses as to why I didn’t rekindle those desires for learning sooner, but truthfully I just wasn’t ready after the endless learning beatdown that was university and the onset of professional life. Something about coming from studying seven days a week straight into constant Jira management, Microsoft Teams alerts, and releasing builds at 2:30 AM while you’re supposed to be on vacation in another country really kills any motivation to be a Software Engineer after you clock out. That is, if you let it.
My goal this year was to not let it. I can honestly say I’ve regained that love. Between reading some fantastic books, starting new projects in GitHub for the hell of it, and FINALLY delving into video game development I remembered why I’m here in the first place.
I hope to share some of this excitement with you here! I started this blog to just log everything I am going through so I can reflect back on it later, and maybe help someone along the way. I also just genuinely enjoy writing and sometimes want to spout off about the latest Hardcore History episode, slow cooker recipe, or world event. So if you want to see me progress and share incoherent updates as I stumble my way through Unreal Engine, C++, software in general, and thoughts on the war in Ukraine, please standby.
Truthfully I expect that no one will ever read this post or entries on this blog, and it is almost a guarantee that this site will collect dust and be another suck on the finite data of the universe, so if that is the case c’est la vie. One way or another I find this helpful, and if anyone ever reads this damn thing, thank you.
Otherwise, at least I can say I finally bought my name in domain format, so fuck it. Worth it?