I'm Back, 2024 Edition!

Wow, has it really been three years since I've updated this site? It's funny how, when you do something for a living, you almost always do it for yourself last. At least, that's always been the case for me. Up until now, I have always had difficulty carving out time for myself, whether it's this personal site, my personal side project, my music, or even just taking a day off to do nothing (the hardest one!).

In my defense, it's been a tumultuous past few years, for all of us I'm sure! From losing one job due to the company folding, to losing TWO more as a result of covid, nearly all my time was lost just trying to keep things stable!

It was a scary time, and I wasn't sure exactly what was going to happen. I was without work for the first time in my life and I had no idea how to deal with it. Should I risk it all and try freelancing full time, or go back to agency work, which I swore I'd finally left behind? Whatever time I wasn't spending filling out applications and submitting resumes was lost to worry and panic, and EVERYTHING got put on hold.

But, as they say, everything happens for a reason. And while I don't believe that for a second, in my life that notion does seem to hold up, as despite the difficulties of the various transitions forced on me throughout my life, they always do seem to ultimately be for the best, and this latest change is by far the best example of that!

A New Happy Home with ACC

In the end, I found a fantastic new home for my career with the American College of Cardiology, a non-profit dedicated to improving the lives of cardiovascular patients and health care providers. While I had zero experience in the medical industry, I did have the credentials they were looking for on their web team, and I was happy to jump aboard, and have been loving every moment of it.

My position and time here with ACC has been, by far, the most fulfilling and satisfying of my entire career! Many companies say they value their employees, that work-life balance is important; ACC means it and shows it. I get a chance to do what I love to do every day while helping the organization make a real difference in the world. And with proper management of the organization and especially our team, I don't have to kill myself or sacrifice my personal life to do it!

I have so much more time in my life now, and while it has taken a while to get here, I feel excited about (if not just a bit uncertain with) having the time to start doing the many things in my life that have been on hold for YEARS.

Write It Up

And writing is right up at the top of the list of things I want to be doing more! .NET has changed so much over the years, and I want to talk about it and the things that I'm doing with it!

But in order to do that I really needed a new way to do it, as, despite its durability and permanence, Wordpress is not the platform for me! I considered many options, including Medium, Substack, Ghost, which are authoring-focused, but didn't want something that was a) going to be hosted elsewhere and b) cost money to monetize. I may be a small-time nobody, but if I only ever make 5 cents from everything I write, I'm putting all five of those cents in my pocket!

After exploring several other options, including the many CMS offerings I've used over the years, I finally settled on Piranha CMS, a fantastic open-source application I have truly come to enjoy using! It has an interesting engine that suited my workflow perfectly, and since it's written in dotnet core, not only can I customize and extend it as much as I need, I can write about all of those efforts too. It's a total win-win!

So here I am, back behind the keyboard, ready to finally do, well, anything! My first post (after this introduction I thank you kindly for sticking through) will describe in technical detail why I chose Piranha, as well as how I set it up and customized it to be exactly what I needed for my site, so stay tuned!

And it doesn't stop there!

Up Next

Writing is just one of many things I have planned for my time. If you don't already know, I'm also a passionate amateur DJ and producer. I even officially released two tracks that you can find on Spotify or your favorite music source! There's definitely more to come there, so be sure to follow my dj blog for updates (tho that will stay on wordpress, at least for now!).

I'm hoping to dabble in video as well, depending on whether or not I get any actual traction in what I'm doing here. A lot of the stuff I plan to write about would make a great video series, so do let me know you'd like to see that for anything that gets posted!

Let's See What Develops!

Okay so enough about me and where I've been and what I hope to do; what matters now is what I actually produce and publish! I've got a queue of topics and even series of posts on various topics, and I'm excited to build, share, and write about them all!

And as always, when I'm done, I'll thank you for reading, and hope that it was helpful!