Working in Public

I’m currently unemployed, and one thing that that means is time. I’ve got a lot of it.

And I’m also a front end developer that misses doing the fun-for-me parts of web development.

And I also just attended the wonderful CascadiaJS conference, where my head got filled up with so much learning with so many fun people.

For about a week now, I’ve had this itch. I want to blog again. I want to make it a semi-regular practice, something like what so many of my fellow omg.lol folks talk about when they link to barry’s post. I think Chris Coyier wrote about this, too.

At the conference, I also discovered something: my main jimwithington.com site’s CSS was borked. Totally busted. And that makes sense, as it was a template site I built before I knew how to do anything, and then I hosted it on surge.sh, and then I always said to myself “hmm, I should update that.”

(this kind of thing happens! as a web dev you don’t always want to do this stuff after work hours, too!)

And theeeennnnn I considered maybe doing a process where I set up a new blog with a new blog service, then eventually replace it with…whatever I come up with.

After a bunch of that, I realized some things:

1. I have both website-from-scratch knowledge and stuff like, yknow, this here weblog space I’m not using.
2. I’ve been wanting to try eleventy for a long time.
3. Building something would both keep me from getting too rusty with my skills and hopefully provide me with talking points, stuff to show off, and new skills.
4. Instead of worrying that my new thing sucks, I could also document the process, doing the “work in public” thing that I’m even more interested in after Jason’s Cascadia Talk.

I’m especially excited about that last point, and feeling a lot of momentum around it. I’m a huge believer in using personal sites as playgrounds to try out new things.

And Jason’s talk taught me that, hey, if you have stuff you love, and you do it in public, that’s a really good way for folks to then ask you to do that kinda work for them.

So let’s see how it goes!

For the most part, my posts are going to live at my weblog.lol, because I haven’t really been using that site, so I figured that now’s the time! When I finish the new thing, I’ll probably roll one of my existing sites (probably this one!) into the weblog one and then go from there.

Anyway, here’s the very first version of what I’m building. I can’t wait to keep adding to it and making it real!