March 14, 2012. That's the day I wrote the first post on my new blog at CodingByChris.com.

Since that glorious inauguration, I wrote a grand total of zero posts.

I don't really remember why I never posted after that. I suspect at least some of it had to do with me putting all of my free time into the now defunct business I was working on around that same time. I did actually write on the blog for the business. However, it was primarily promotional type posts and updates about the software.

It's been almost 9 years since I last attempted to write on that blog. So, I'm really just making excuses at this point.

So, why did I never write? I do enjoy writing after-all. I wrote a fair bit for fun as a kid for a sort of catch-all review site. It even had a pretty big forum community at the time. I also attribute a big portion of my career success as a software engineer to both being decent at writing and enjoying it. Especially at my last job, I was known for being the one who wrote documentation.

I suspect one of the biggest reasons may have been a sort of fear of how I would be perceived. What if I'm just flat-out wrong? What if I say something that offends someone? What if people just don't like it? What if it's used against me somehow? What if someone interprets it differently than I meant it to be?

I've spent a lot time over the past years retrospecting on how others perceive me vs. how I thought I would be perceived. I think that served me well, was really important to me personally to understand better, and helped me immensely in my career. However, I also think it created an anxiety I didn't really have before. It made some of the aforementioned fears bigger for me. I'm still working on a good balance there.

This leads into the second biggest reason I likely never wrote: time. It's not that there were not enough hours in the day. None of my past jobs consumed my life to the point where I didn't have time for hobbies either. Despite that, I'd have a sort of mental exhaustion lingering over me that made me feel like I never had time. It would come and go, but for a while, gradually got worse.

I think therapy would have helped. Ultimately, I've made a lot of personal discoveries on my own. I think I have my partner from then to thank for helping me understand a lot of my self as well. But, frankly, I maybe could have come to certain conclusions faster with therapy.

While I have made great progress working on myself, there's a more blatant reason why time is no longer an issue for me: I quit my job back in September to take an extended career break. I plan to write a bit more about it later.

September was a while ago though! Why am I just starting now?! Well, for one, I was stressed. Secondly, I had some grand plan to make the blog from scratch, but at the same time, I was burnt out from software development. There have been some things since that I wanted to write about, but have now forgotten or lost interest in because I didn't want to write with no where to publish. I was stubborn and any reasonable person would give you the advice to just start writing and use whatever is easiest to publish.

You know what though? It's ok. Ultimately, the blog and the writing is for me. If spending way too much time writing a custom blog and deployment system for it brought me joy, then that's really all that matters. Also, I now have something interesting to write about: the making of this blog.

If you read this far, then great! If not, oh well. The real value of this post is not just to get others to read it, but to also learn something about myself through the process of writing it.

Writing this post was fun and I hope to be motivated enough to write more. Until next time,

--Chris