Posted May 21, 2018

When Worlds Collide

This isn't my first blog. But it's my first as a nascent developer. Can I successfully balance my writer and developer sides? And more importantly, will anyone bother to look at either?

Dipping my toe in the blogging pool

I started blogging in 2009 on the Blogger platform. I don't know whether anyone even uses it anymore, but my blog is still up there. For some reason, my post about a dying mosquito resonated with a lot of people, so I'll link to it here once more for old time's sake.

While I started this blog intending to talk about social media, you can tell by the mosquito post I strayed from my original mission — so much so that the original titled morphed to Miscellaneous Online Musings. I didn't think I had anything unique to say, and I was already more interested in how digital content worked as opposed to its substance. Foreshadowing indeed.

Posting with a purpose

Fast forward a few years to 2013. I became my Grandmother's caregiver in 2005 when my dear Grandfather passed away, and we lived together in relative harmony for eight years. In 2012 she started showing signs of dementia, and even though her doctor never actually diagnosed her with the disease, it slowly took her memory.

By 2013 I was working at home because I worried about Granny wandering off with her Kleenex ear flaps (she said they protected her ears) and her elastic-less pants (if they weren't sagging, they were too tight). I read everything I could about caring for a loved one with dementia, but everything I found was either unhelpful, woefully outdated or titled something like Signs Your Loved One Needs Assisted Living. In my frustration I started blogging, and Grandma Drives Me Crazy was born.

Writing this blog was an amazing experience. It was somewhere to vent. Someplace to educate. And a wonderful laboratory for building an audience through organic content optimization. I built a small following — mostly comprising other caregivers who welcomed some honest conversations about helping someone who's living with dementia. It takes more than checklists and platitudes to maintain your sanity when you're balancing raising children, working and taking care of someone who forgets something new every day. In a very real sense, blogging helped me help her.

Merging passions through words

One thing my second blog reinforced for me was the importance of maintaining a consistent theme. It's easy to attract readers with a singular subject, and I plan to adhere to that with blog number three. I've thought many times as I struggle with learning a new development technology or celebrate the occasional epiphany that it would be great to have a place to share my thoughts and get feedback from others on their own coding journey. And now I do.

Unlike my previous blogs, this one isn't hosted on an existing platform or created through a CMS. So functionality is up to me lol. I hope to work with a mentor at Kansas City Women in Technology (KCWiT) to merge my development and content portfolios along with this blog into one all-encompassing showcase of my content and development work. I don't know where my skills will lead me career-wise, but I'll be back here often to log my thoughts along the way.