It’s been awhile since I just wrote a blog post, and a lot has happened. My last actual blog post was a review of 2022, which was probably the worst year of my life. Since then, I’ve gotten married, I have a new job that I love, and have discovered that I was probably hyperfixating a bit too much on tech.
I’ve always been into technology (I’ve previously written about it), but it was in early 2018 when I made the hard pivot from IT manager/administrator into software development. Coincidentally, this was the same time that I left the church I grew up attending and came out as transgender. I did a speed run of frontend best practices for my first project, going from jQuery to vanilla JS to Vue in the span of a few weeks. The backend did a similar run from PHP and MySQL to NodeJS and Postgres.
In that first year, I graduated from The Tech Academy, switched my bachelor’s program, and wrote a new web-based application to replace my company’s previous solution from 1995. I dove into every podcast I could find, read as much as I could, and explored almost all the common frontend frameworks (sorry Angular). I even built a real-time LAN-based board game, just to see if I could.
Looking at it from today’s perspective, I was using code to avoid (or replace) feelings that I was having as two of the central pillars of my identity crashed to dust around me, and I didn’t stop until, well, 2023. That was the year I started my tech podcast, Human Side of Dev, and tried to keep a weekly cadence of editing recordings. I started the podcast while living in a basement too small for my height, trying to figure out what I was supposed to do next.
But then, by luck, happenstance, or the aligning of stars, I met the person I would marry. And while I was still scraping the bottom of my emotional barrel, and filling the holes with Javascript-shaped duct tape, I also learned that I was someone worth loving, and not just because I’d written a cool technical article on Astro or interviewed really cool people.
It’s still hard, even now, to really feel comfortable talking about the things I enjoy beyond tech. I felt panicked just writing my new description on the about page. But I’m going to start doing it anyway, because I don’t need to define myself by my job, or my tech stack, or what the latest discussions are among framework authors.
For 2026, I’m rekindling my website as a place for creativity and joy. I think it’s going to be a very fun year.
