professional development

In my last few posts, I’ve walked down memory lane, and talked about a ton of great successes I’ve had in my five years as blogger & speaker. It’s been fun to reminisce about how far I’ve come and brag about some success. Today’s post … [Read More]

In Year Three, my goal was to keep focused on what I learned in the FreeCon the year before, and keep moving forward with speaking and blogging. I was putting a bit more effort into my speaking (and thus easing off on the blogging some).

In Year 1, I only wrote 6 blog posts. In Year 2, I decided to take things seriously, and kicked things into high gear. During this 12-month period, I wrote 36 blog posts–my best 12-months as far as pace & productivity in these five years.

I’ve lost my blog stats for that first year, so I can’t say exactly how many visitors I had. I can say that the number of views was so low that it didn’t matter. If I were going to offer a generous estimate, I would guess I got whopping 100 page views in year one (mostly from me). I wrote a total of six blog posts that year. Let’s look at two of my favorites.

On May 16, 2014, I bought a domain on a whim. I’d been sitting in the NOCC at my employer, helping with maintenance. I was waiting on another team to perform their task, and champing at the bit. Over the next week, I set up a Blogger website, tied my domain to it, and thought about what I’d done at work recently that might be worth sharing.

I’m a college drop-out. When I was trying to figure out my life, a friend (my brother’s ex) referred me to a software company where she was working–I got the job because I was (a) breathing, (b) eager to do the job, and (c) cheap. … [Read More]

Bloggers spend a lot of time writing about our successes, but we’re human and we make mistakes, too. This post is a chance to share one of my memorable failures.