New beginnings

As the saying goes, "today is the first day of the rest of your life."

I turned 35 recently and thought that might be a good time to start the rest of that life. Don't get me wrong, my life has been truly blessed over the last many years, and almost every single year of life has been like starting anew. At 31 I accepted Christ as Lord and met the woman He had in mind for me, Kat. At 32 I married her. At 34 she gave me my first son, Jack. And now, at 35, I want to move forward in life in a way that will make all of the aforementioned persons proud.

I have a lot going on. A great job, two rental properties, some promising investments. I also have a lot of things to do, to work on, to improve--like my health and fitness. I keep trying to get into better habits, but it's really hard. Maybe a separate post on that would be good.

My friend John sent me a blog by a software engineer named Matt Rickard. It's a rather simple blog, and if you can't already tell, it's largely the inspiration for mine.

What I appreciate about Matt's blog is how simple it is, yet how in-depth his content is. I'm guilty of often building the opposite. I have taken a stab or two at starting blogs in the past. I've tried using platforms like Substack or Wordpress, I've tried building my own using Gatsby or next.js (that's what this one is built in), and since I am a software engineer who builds apps for a living (specifically, iPhone apps), I find myself getting completely sidetracked by all of the engineering tasks, adding features, refactoring, updating libraries, refactoring, improving performance, and refactoring.

There's nothing wrong with any of that, of course, but what's the point of working on a blog website, if there is no content? I guess the question I have to ask myself with this blog is... what is the product? Is it the content? Or the website? And if it's both, which takes precedent?

My intention with this new blog is to prioritize content over function. A thanks to Matt Rickard for showing how that might look.

Another blog I have taken some inspiration from is Swift with Majid. It's an equally simple blog that I have personally benefited from over the years. If you're into (or interested in) iOS development, make sure to check him out.

What will you write about?

Nobody has actually asked me that question, but I imagine if you're one of the three people to have read this far, you might have asked it soon.

And the answer is, I'll write about whatever I want. This will not be strictly a software blog, or a philosophy blog, or a religious blog, or a politics blog, or a creativity blog. Frankly, I'd like it to be all of that because for me, all of that is connected.

I'm already adding tags to these posts, so it should be rather straight forward for anybody reading this to filter to the posts that interest you most (this post is only tagged blog-update, to which I hope will belong to many more posts in the weeks, months and years to come).

As the saying goes, "today is the first day of the rest of your life." May this blog live long and be a record of what the rest of that life is for me.

Here's to new beginnings. In life and in blogs.