I started posting on this blog around 2007. At that time I was midway through the first decade working for myself, attempting to create a viable business. That entailed:
- Writing technical books, mostly about programming, databases, and web development
- Actually doing those things so I knew what I was writing about
- Teaching those things
- Speaking at conferences about those things
- Trying to “build my brand” on social media
That last category resulted in this blog, my newsletter, being on Twitter, and so forth. I’m not sure I was ever very good at marketing stuff, but it seemed like the kind of thing a prudent writer should do. Also, my publisher kept poking me to do it.
Over the next decade, my personal life became more complicated and demanding, I got a proper full-time job at a startup, and I had more obligations than time. Way more obligations than time.
It took an appalling number of years for me to finish my self-published book, and even that was after I gave up doing any social media–this blog, my newsletter, Twitter. It seemed unjust to spend any other amount of time doing non-book projects when I wasn’t keeping up with my book writing. So I got off Twitter, stopped sending out newsletters, stopped posting on this blog.
And now I’m on the other side of all that, in the third decade of my professional career. My personal life is less complicated and demanding. I returned to consulting. And I finally–finally!–finished my self-published book. I’ve since open sourced that book, which was always the hope. I’m not sure that it matters this late in the game, but it was important to me that I did finish the book. So there’s that.
I’m not writing other books anymore, or updating existing ones. Not that anyone is asking. And I can’t imagine posting anymore on this blog. Not that anyone is reading it regardless.
But I wanted to officially sign off on this part of my career. And to sincerely, most sincerely, thank everyone along the way that made my “Translating Geek into English” life possible. All the readers, students, attendees, people with feedback (positive, constructive, or not), the patient ones, the reasonably impatient ones, the generous folks, the demanding folks…just everyone that cared for whatever reason about what I had to say.
I wanted to be a writer long before I really knew what that meant. I’ll never stop being grateful that I got to be an actual writer, and that my writing turned out to be helpful, even meaningful, to so many people.