Starting over

Josh Brown, formerly “The Reformed Broker,” and more recently “Downtown Josh Brown” has ended his long-running blog, and restarted. A lot of what he said about it resonates with me as I emerge from a few months of necessary recovery from a bad situation.

Unlike Josh, I never created a persona around my blog, and I don’t see the need to restart completely. But this blog was long overdue for a pruning of obsolete (and at this point, wrong or potentially misleading) content. I’ve been absent here for a long time, as I’ve been focused on other things. But I’m feeling ready to write again, and I’ve set up this new environment to do it in. (Elsewhere, I’ve been traveling again, and slowly catching up with the writing on my travel blog too!)

Part of what’s driving me is that I recently left my second job at AWS. Unfortunately this time it was without any of the great memories or sense of regret that I had the first time. In fact, I was glad it was finally over, and spent the better part of a week just sleeping off the exhaustion. It was a powerful lesson that even a great company has pockets that are horrible, and that not every role will work for everybody, even if you’ve enjoyed a supposedly-similar role elsewhere in the organization. Also, your manger matters more than anything and you need to choose carefully. If you don’t have a strong good vibe from minute one, say no.

With that behind me, I feel freer, at least for now, to comment on what I see around me in the tech world and elsewhere. In the coming months I have a few conference presentations to give, and a few more things that are worth sharing. I’ll be doing that.

Finally, this website has been broken and unusable for way too long. The infrastructure behind it was creaky, the database had been messed up by some faulty plugins, and the theme I was using no longer was receiving support. I was unable to upgrade to a current and supported php version. I was able to post, but not to upload images or do much else. I’ve now fixed that, so can hopefully focus on writing rather than worrying about the tech infrastructure.

I don’t expect that I’ll be formal. Some articles (like the recent series about what I did to move this blogging environment) may be little more than some edited notes of my experiments, chronicling the non-linear thinking that often describes how i approach things. Others will be more focused, but still informal. Occasionally, you may see a bit of my old Amazon-style 2-pager approach. Over time, I’ll edit and refine the tags I use to more clearly differentiate things as appropriate.