Breaking radio silence
I noticed I didn't write a blog post in over 3 years and I reflected on why I think that is.
TL;DR: Founding a family, focusing on work instead of public relations and imposter syndrome.
A blog is born
I started this blog in 2019. At the time I wasn't finding too much joy with the direction work related projects took, so I had started hobby projects. Those cured the itch for technological excitement and gave me a sense of freedom I haven't felt in my job at the time. Naturally I wanted to write about what excited me and, inspired by other great developers who were blogging and sharing gems of wisdom, I followed their path.
It didn't take long and my work got noticed. I was contracted to work on Khronos Group's KTX-Software, to implement features for glTFast (my very own open source project) and got solid job offers. One of which was from Unity. They asked me to continue working on my hobby projects on their payroll, a dream come true offer that I gladly took. I'm not sure if my blog played a significant part in these things happening. While I think my work on open source projects spoke the loudest, I'd like to believe that the blog helped ever so slightly.
Activity going down
Before I joined Unity I dished out 11 blog posts over the course of 1.5 years. The next 1.5 years only three more posts and then I stopped completely. What happened?
Pack up all you belongings
Starting at Unity forced me to relocate to a country where they had a legal entity to be employed by. While I interviewed with Unity my girlfriend got pregnant. We decided to move to Hamburg, Germany, as my girlfriend is German and we would live close by my in-laws. Our first child was born 4 months into my new role. We married later that year, another two summers later our second child was born and we moved yet again to a place that was big enough for the four of us.
There's no guarantee for health
During her second pregnancy my wife developed gestational diabetes. Definitely something to be taken seriously, but usually not too concerning long-term. When she continued to check her blood sugar levels after childbirth (out of pure curiosity) it was still way too high. She then got diagnosed with diabetes type 1, a permanent condition. It turned her's and our life around, as you can imagine.
Before becoming a parent I used to stay up late and sleep until shortly before I got to work. After working hours I had plenty of time and energy for hobbies and even more so on the weekends. It was in those hours where I worked on blog posts. Those precious hours and my energy got directed towards a much more important thing now, supporting my family.
Doing vs. writing
Most people have heard this public relations quote at some point:
Do something good and talk about it.
Though promotion might help getting more support for my projects and possibly advance my career as well, I enjoy hacking on projects much more than rambling on about it. It's a bit different when it's purely about sharing knowledge, but even that takes time away from doing productive work.
Never good enough
I rarely feel that my work is good enough to hold up in the spotlight and tend to focus on the remaining flaws. That relates to both my software as well as my blog posts.
By now I started many blog posts which ended up unpublished and abandoned in half-finished state as I didn't feel they were of substantial value.
A little reminder for me and my fellow impostor syndrome victims: Perfect is the enemy of done.
A no-reason to highlight
One would have to think the fear of being exposed as fraud must stem from experiencing malevolent, adverse criticism.
Quite the opposite is true. In all those years putting out my work all I've gotten has been acknowledgements, words of encouragement and praise. Criticism has only been formulated in positive and constructive manner. Even when I haven't answered issue reports or pull requests on GitHub in weeks, I was never met with hostility whatsoever.
Given that there's so many stories about open source maintainers who have to endure toxic behaviour I'm super grateful that this never happened to me, not even once.
Thank you, people of the internet ❤️ for keeping my hope in humanity intact.
So, where does that lead us
I don't plan on becoming a volume writer anytime soon, but I'd like to slowly resurrect the habit of writing posts to share my learnings.
The kids grow and become more independent by the day. My wife has gotten somewhat comfortable with her condition and we are steadily learning to better balance our individual needs within the family. All that leads me to believe I'll able to spend more time on things like sports and hobbies, including this blog.
I might broaden the topics I write about, starting with this blog post. Coding, personal stories, non-work-related hobbies, you name it.
At the very least some AI bots will enjoy crawling it. Maybe my kids dig it out, once they're older. Who knows.
Thanks for sticking around.