My 'Hello World'

Throughout the entirety of building this site, in the back of my head I’ve been contemplating “What will my first post be about? It needs to be great, attention grabbing and informative.” I started jotting down topics and planning tutorials that I’d like to write about. Things that I felt would both interest and help others.

Should my first post be about this site and how it’s built? All the details of building a site using Gatsby? The plugins I am using, about learning GraphQL, or what in the world a gatsby-browser.js file is.. Maybe about how I deployed it on AWS? The ins and outs of DNS settings or why I chose a particular Amazon service? Or.. should my first post be more personal. Perhaps my reasoning, intentions and goals for this site and blog and why I felt the need to even incorporate a blog. My "hello" to all potential readers.

I opted for the latter. There will be plenty of opportunities for the technical posts I am excited to write. But for now I wanted to share the whys as I am certain there are many developers out there debating on doing the same thing I am trying to do and not sure if they should.

The Site

First and foremost, I wanted a place to showcase myself. My skills, my goals, the work I am currently doing and have done in the past. All with hopes of finding awesome new clients in order to help them achieve their goals, create some new connections and friendships or maybe even catch the attention of a company looking to hire someone like me. How can I expect to do all of that without a platform such as this?

So I got to planning. What should be on the site? And just as important, what shouldn’t be on the site? How do I sell myself without sounding full of myself yet sound confident in my knowledge? How much information is too much, or too little? All of these questions were new to me. How could I be sure I got everything right?

Then I thought, so what? So what if I don’t get everything 100% right. The code we write isn’t always correct or perfect on the first go around is it? So why should this be any different? That’s the fun in learning, that’s why we do what we do. To get everything right all the time would be boring, where’s the challenge in that?

The Blog

I left out one pivotal reason as to why I started this whole thing, more specifically the blog. Its main purpose and goal is to help others learn and grow. I’ve been helped so much in the past by the generosity of others who’ve shared their knowledge through blogging. I wanted to be that resource for someone else. Give back to the community.

Before this, I never thought of myself as the blogging type. Mainly because I honestly didn’t see the point of it, who would read what I had to say? Also, I don’t consider myself much of a writer. It’s just not one of the areas I’ve ever felt especially knowledgeable in. I am hoping that through this, my viewpoints on all of this change for the better because I genuinely want this to be beneficial for not only myself but again for anyone who stumbles across this in search of answers or help.

So it may go without saying at this point that the content of this blog will be mostly technical, sprinkled with humility, random analogies and the occasional bad joke or pun. Posts presented as how-tos or “Hey, I just learned this cool thing I wanted to share it with you”. But within all of them will hopefully be some semblance of knowledge to be gained.

Wrapping Up

I hope to not only share a lot but learn a lot from this and I hope you all learn something along the way as well. I think that is more my goal than anything else, sharing knowledge. My view or approach to a specific topic may not be the best and feel free to let me know, but again that’s why we do what we do. To learn and keep advancing at what we love.

I mentioned earlier that I am sure there are others out there thinking about doing this very thing. Putting their work out there and writing about it along the way. If you happen to be one of them, think about your “whys” and go for it.