🎤 Mic Check...Is this thing even on?

One of the biggest mental traps of "adulting" is thinking that everything needs a purpose. Somewhere between growing up and earning a living, the "grind" seems to get the better of us. Casual conversations get deprioritized in favour of "networking" for one's own benefit, hobbies should somehow yield some form of profit, pet projects should be potential cash cows, social media content should be marketable, questions about anything should be treated as consultations. It's an endless list. Everything is fodder for the great grind. Even this website.

This website was ready about 2 months ago, but I couldn't get myself to write anything. For a bit of context, I'm a Software Engineer - a really good one - and when building this website, I decided to showcase things I could do. I put in all the flashy stuff, and I had such a fun time learning things on the go, but the journey didn't feel "rewarding" enough to put out. I was stuck in this thinking, and after a bit of soul-searching, I remembered why I built it in the first place. Afterwards, I summoned the courage to put pen to paper.

Well, a couple of reasons, actually. The biggest one would be that I had just been invited to the AWS Community Builder program and was given a substantial amount of AWS credits. For non-technical folk who might be reading this, it's the equivalent of being handed the key to the city. I could build, run, test, and deploy things to my heart's content. It was going to be an opportunity for me to learn about some of the great things I could do with AWS, and building was the best way I could learn.

Second, I'm very deep into Open Source. Whether it's contributing directly, teaching people about it, showing people how to contribute, writing about it, talking about it, or even just thinking about it, a lot of my free time revolves (in some way) around Open Source. My favourite Open Source projects are the Wagtail CMS and the Django web framework, and this website gave me a chance to use them on something personal for a change. Before now, I'd only used them for client projects, and I'm glad they will be sharing my corner of the Internet with me.

Finally, this website was my ticket to a personal digital playground. I like to build (and tear down), and I like having a place to share what I've built for other people to play around with. I like the thought of having a shared living space for all the ridiculous ideas that come to my head. Be it a random project I tinker with by 2 am on a Saturday, or a side quest I start during my work commute, I have a safe space in a way that connects them all back to me. I'm thinking of a few of them as I write this.

This is the part I haven't quite figured out yet, but I plan on writing and scribbling as much as I can. I can't yet commit to a writing schedule religiously, though.

If you still have to ask this, then you may not have been paying attention. The whole point of this article is on line 1. Anyway, I'm glad if you made it this far.

Thanks for reading, and see you next time.

Cheers! 🥂