Here We Go Again

Am I writing this blog for you or me?

When I was first learning how to build websites there were several people who helped me on a regular basis; people who were always faceless, and are now, unfortunately, nameless, as it’s been so long…

Over the years I’d wade into SitePoint or Stack Overflow from time to time and answer some questions to try and give back, but I was either too busy to keep it up or some people would just be complete assholes and ruin it for me. You know the type.

So I stopped helping.

I never considered myself a good coder. I always thought of myself as a decent developer, but a shit coder. I come up with good ideas - and the app always turns out great - but I probably do things much less efficiently than I could and I was always a little behind on best practices. I’m old school, and the young guys let me know it. I had a hell of a struggle with GitHub, and I still do.

So I did other things.

From time to time I’d put up a Gist or a Tumblr post with a code snippet, or even create a screencast because I finally figured out how to do something other people hadn’t. Receiving happy comments and emails was very rewarding, but I just wasn’t very good at staying with it… and then the assholes would step in and ruin it again.

So I stopped helping. Again.

I was never good at being told what to do or how to do it, unless I wanted to be told. And the only time I want to be told how to do something is when I’m learning.

One of the benefits of aging is you start to care less and less about what other people think, and care more and more about what keeps you happy and fulfilled, and helping people is something that’s very fulfilling to me.

So I decided to start helping. And blogging.

I finally learned GitHub and Jekyll and decided to create repos for some projects I’d been working on; I wanted to get them out there in hopes they’ll help somebody, because they sure aren’t doing anybody any good sitting in my Sites folder.

I’m going to try and keep this updated, and I’m going to try not to give out bad advice… or bad code! I’ve been building sites for almost 20 years, so I think my experience is probably my strongest asset, because - according to the purists - it sure as hell isn’t best practices!

To answer my initial question: I think this post was for me. So the rest are for you.