I am where I am because of open source. Twelve years ago when I started my first full time job position I didn’t know much. I got hired as solo developer for an internal CMS for a laboratory. An application on top of Postgres to register and manage tools.
Anyway this is not the point, I didn’t know much, after a few days writing spaghetti code I realized that I was not going anywhere so I opened IRC, I joined the PHP channel and I started asking questions. Somebody picked them up and I realized that near my place we had a PHP Meetup where I finally found somebody with a proper team who hired me, my contract ended and I joined a team.
TLDR open source is what made me the developer I am, not because I write the tip of the iceberg, not because my code seats for 99% of open source code written by somebody else but because of the community I was surrounded since day one.
I already had a blog, 12 years ago I was 19 and my blog was mainly about tech news because I was not a developer, I didn’t have much to share of my own.
But blogging turned to be crucial for my career as a developer, a little bit as giveback and also because I need to be findable. I live in a country where salary don’t stay up to date with inflation, figuring my way out to it makes a difference.
All of this to say that I enjoy writing tutorials or lesson learned about operations, development, monitoring but not here, on my personal diary because I don’t think they belong to here. I end up not writing them, not giving back to the community I belong to.
Also internet is a lot different compared to 12-15 years ago and I feel I need to prepare for something new.
I can’t stop thinking about what Chris Ferdinand is doing with GoMakeThings, I am not a frontend eng and to be host I didn’t find an area or a technology that I felt in love with like frontend looks for Chris (I hope you will find somebody that will look at you like Chris writes about frontend!), but I like to read what he writes, I am not sure consultancy will be for me but I like the place he developed for itself and I feel like it is time for me to figure out where to share what I learn about delivery, cloud, containers, CI and so on. Things that don’t fit to this blog.
I have shippingbytes.com sitting around for a while and I am thinking about using it for this purpose, in a world where GenAI steals from knowledge owner to serve anonymous answers I am thinking about starting a my content creation journey.
I am not good at all when it comes to timing. This is why I need your support, your support and empathy.
I also want to experiment with something that is not a static site generator because content creators needs their own tools. First version of this blog was Joomla, ShippingBytes right now runs locally as custom theme for Wordpress.
I know you didn’t expect that but what if wysiwyg will spark joy? And I know ShippingBytes will have a newsletter, a database will be useful anyway, static site is not enough.