And it has been so for about 2 weeks.

One of my goals this year is to pick this blog up again. I have written some stuff in Medium which I have decided to move to this blog (I just haven’t gotten around to doing it), but even then it has been a while since I last published something. It’s that old habit almost everyone has of starting something and never getting it pushed to the finish line, you know?

My initial goal with writing stuff on Medium was to gain some relevance in such medium (no pun intended). And although some of my posts did reach an amazing 15 views (hey, it’s something!) within a week, I didn’t exactly felt like that was a space I owned. On a personal level there is something I find special about having things you can call your own, even if they are not technically the best, or the latest, or the fanciest. It wouldn’t be different with a blog.

And when you have things to call your own, you don’t have to pander to what others think. If they like it, they like it. If not, well, everyone has the right to their own opinions.

For example, for personal projects I usually avoid using any elements which might impact page load or performance, as I enjoy pushing performance optimizations as far as I can to see at what point they cause things to break. As a consequence, this blog seldom uses images. Which reminds me of this one time last year a recruiter persistently asked me for a solo project and I linked them to this blog. They told me, in a half-shocked half-alarmed tone, that “the images aren’t loading”, and then I told them “no, it’s exactly like that”. We were talking on the phone, and they went completely silent for an entire 5 seconds.

As I understood it, their silence was essentially their way of saying “wow, I hate it”.

Now, the work I do professionally is usually with the intent not of doing what I like, but adding value to the people who pay me (or specifically, their clients). For this, if I have to use 100 images in a page, I will (after passing them through TinyPNG most likely!). But it’s not what I’d do in this blog. So maybe this way of doing things didn’t resound with the recruiter – their reaction immediately revealed that I was probably not a cultural fit for that role. Ditto, I never heard back from them.

I’m not saying that they had “bad” or “wrong” taste, the whole “I’m a genius but the world doesn’t understand me” persona doesn’t really fit me. But standing for what you are usually pays off, either directly ($), or indirectly – in this case, it saved me from an environment I might have not fit in.

So I guess that’s all for now. Not this week, but later this month I have a lot of ideas for texts that I want to post here, so looking forward to that!

P.S: I might add some color to the blog soon, who knows. 🙂