If you follow me on LinkedIn, you’ll notice I’ve been posting a lot of my well thought out thoughts there and occasionally on X. I’ve been using these platforms to share my ideas.

In the past, I’ve blogged about various things but, for whatever reason, I would give up as I lost my focus and desire to keep going.

Since I started my company, Identus Consulting, and have been doing a lot more speaking on AI, Ruby, and various other topics related to technology, I feel as though I have more of a focus.

A few of my goals

Share my work

You may have heard of the thought experiment, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” I’ve been working on a lot of various things lately and have been struggling to find ways to share these things. Sometimes it’s because I have limited time, but partly it’s because I don’t have a place to centralize everything I work on. A blog seems like a great place to do that. I can link to my GitHub, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Meet potential clients

I think a blog is a great way to meet more potential clients and gain their trust. Hopefully, publishing a few projects and showcasing a few talks here will make you or your organization want to work with me on your next AI or software project. I have over a decade of experience and have worked in Fortune 500 companies to smaller startups.

Own my content and audience

It’s incredibly frustrating and disruptive when various social media sites collapse, change ownership, or become unfavored, causing an exodus of users to various platforms. I don’t have the time and energy to keep up with all these emerging platforms. I’m tired. I just want to work on AI stuff, hang out with significant people in my life, and not be burdened with all this moving around.

The people who are really interested in what I’m doing can come here and trust they will get the best version of whatever I am posting elsewhere. This also gives me an exit strategy should the platforms I use change in ways that are not tolerable to me.

Connect with like-minded individuals

This would be a big bonus for me. I want to engage with people who are doing interesting things, and it would be great to give like-minded people a glimpse into my brain with the hope that we could collaborate and share ideas. I’m highly driven by creativity and curiosity. I like challenging the status quo and want to meet others who are interested in doing things outside of the norm.

Write more. Publish more

I’d like to write a lot more. I beat up on myself because sometimes I do write, but I’m always slow to publish and get bogged down with the editing piece. I’m going to try to push more content even if it isn’t fully proofed. I’m hoping if the meat of what I’m writing about has enough substance, I won’t have to worry about how polished my work is. There are other avenues where a high level of polish is warranted: books, journals, and paid articles for another establishment.

But I’m going to try really hard not to care so much about polishing a ton and focus on sharing more.

Why not roll your own blog?…

this part is mostly for me since I’ve had a fair amout of anxiety around this

There is so much friction to just write and I often found my self doing what developers call Yak Shaving. In my younger years, I would have spent an unhealthy amount of time looking for the perfect blog theme, or worse, trying to design my own theme, only to stress out and abandon blogging altogether.

This pattern is a common destroyer of productivity for many technologists. We wind up going to do one thing, like starting a blog, and end up creating a whole blogging platform. In utter exhaustion, we give up. No more!

I’m trying to get better at strategically using my time more effectively to maximize the value I provide for myself and my clients.

I’m not trying to work harder; I’m trying to get more meaningful work done. It’s as simple as that.

So I want to thank the creator of this blog theme for making my life a bit less stressful and for helping me use my time to do more important things like write posts like this!

Cheers!