When you’re working and married with kids (in my case it’s still just A kid for now) it’s easy to lose yourself in the day to day, go on autopilot for the necessary things to do just to get through a week. Any extra time, you spend it resting cause its difficult to keep up with the energy of kids!
Im glad that F and I have done good on making sure we go on date nights at least once a month, though most of the time, we speed through dinner to go home to our cute little munchkin. It’s great to be able to have a chance to focus on each other too.
One more thing I need to get in order is my me time. It’s been difficult for me to get back into a rhythm of doing things. I’ve had to adjust from single to married to pregnant to mother mode in the recent years and I’ve used that as an excuse to not have time for myself and do the things I used to do (blogging, coding, reading, etc). I have had time but its mostly in bursts, so it never had a chance to be part of my routine. You’ll notice the past few days I’ve been active on the blog scene but I have a feeling it won’t be for long, although I do hope I stick to it.
I’ve always enjoyed reading blogs from the past. Whenever I feel nostalgic, I blog hop across the many blogs I’ve owned (note to self, I should email myself the links to all my blogs and back up my self hosted ones). It’s too bad my first ever blog was hosted on geocities, I won’t even get started. After that I’ve had at least 6 different blogs from anonymous, to work related, tech blogs, personal blogs.
When I started blogging, it was more for me to be able to rant and express myself, than to share my what I know or learned. My friend was thinking about blogging to keep herself occupied but then she said, “why would people want to read what I have to say”. She feels the same about other social media, she’s more a lurker than a sharer on Facebook. It made me think about myself, does anyone really need to hear about my feelings or ideas? I guess I probably should have kept a diary or something but I didn’t want to bother with running out of paper or handwriting or losing a file so i blogged online. And then geocities died so I still lost that part of my life but then I started going back and forth between blogspot, WordPress and live journal and a few self hosted ones. I guess the reason I hopped a few times was because there were some blogs I started that was meant for reflection and some that were meant for sharing tips, code, technology etc. and then there were those that were neglected too long that I’d forgotten their credentials.
It was my job at microsoft that got me started on the habit of blogging to share code/new technology. Although I was still kind of blogging for myself ( I have terrible memory and blogging helped me remember how to do stuff, teach myself and teach others too) a huge amount of it was spent thinking about structure, adding images to make it more understandable, step by step guides. When I left that job all of a sudden I found myself not being able to write anything simply because I thought I needed to structure it, or I need to have pictures to illustrate my point, ending up in the idea not being blogged at all. I envy people who are able to do this naturally, but I’m one of those people who’s brain just flies all over the place. I think I started blogging to make sense of myself, and when i started doing it for an audience, I began to hold back more, edit myself more, and it just became too much of a chore. I did try maintaining two separate blogs for personal and stuff meant to be shared but I always ended up neglecting or forgetting one. I’ve also had a “one blog fits all” phase but when I was getting a lot of hits for my tech posts, I was too embarrassed to post personal ones. I think it was also because a lot of my then audience came through my job so I didn’t feel i could express myself as freely. But now that I think about it, just like in real life, you shouldn’t be ashamed about it. If its something you’re comfortable doing, you can talk about anything and everything on your blog. If you’re posting for your personal blog, I don’t think you should consider whether people would want to hear what you have to day say. I think as long as its something you aren’t ashamed to be associated with, then by all means post! If they don’t like what you have to say, they can always move on.
Well that was a rant and a half.
being in tech 