First Real Post

Well here we go! This will be my fourth real attempt at a legit personal website and blog and so far I think it’s shaping up nicely! Seriously though, in the last week, I tried 3 other platforms / methods for building and managing this thing and now I’m happy to say I like doing it with Astro! Oh, and really, this is my first post. The other two are artifacts of the template I used to build this out and I decided I’ll leave them in the queue for now because Fernando Lopez | EFEELE is a great frontend developer, and I think they are useful to anyone getting into learning HTML, CSS or JS or just web-development in general.

So, What is this all about?

New Horizons

For the past 5 years I’ve been earnestly working toward buying and taking over a construction company. I’ve learned the business from the ground up and spent these last 5 years near the top of the organization and was very close to doing it. But, as it happens sometimes in life, everything changed (almost overnight) and I found myself in period of transition again, which is always a little discomforting, but once I was able to fully let go of the vision of the alternate future I had been nurturing for so long, it was also somehwat of a relief. I had more time to spend with my children, time to take care of all the little neglected projects accumulating around the house over the last couple of very busy years, and time to think. What will I do next?

Start a different business?

I’ll probably write up another post to completely explore this idea and elaborate on some of my ideas about the construction industry in general, but the short version is: probably not. At least not right now. My wife and I know from first-hand experience what it can take to get a new business off the ground and unfortunately, it’s just not in the cards at this juncture. Although I’m currently in between jobs, as I’ll explain in the rest of this post, I’m confident I’ll be working in some capacity by the end of the summer and <6 months is just not a realistic timeline to bootstrap a business that needs to also be a primary source of income for a growing family.

Day-Trading?

This sounded appealing and I dabbled consistently early-on this year. It’s so… stupid. simple. And despite or because of that fact, it’s also really difficult and equally unrealistic to think that it will replace income from a full-time regular job in a short amount of time.

Work with/for my Wife’s business?

My wife and I actually discussed this and both came to the same conclusion: not right now. 😉 Her business is doing great, and it’s maintaining a steady and sustainable growth trajectory but we both agreed it just didn’t sound like a wise thing for both of us to be involved, and therefore both reliant on it for income for our family. ‘Too many eggs in one basket’ to quote the old addage.

Try to get hired in tech?

Like the day-trading idea, this one is appealing because of the potential for flexible schedule, remote work, and decent pay. There are two hurdles for me on this path, though:

• I don’t have the formal education most Tech employers are looking for
• I don’t have the work experience most Tech employers are looking for

I feel like I’ve cultivated a healthy amount of first-hand experience on this front, but it is a work in progress and without the exposure to working on teams, I fear and suspect it’s a career path that I probably won’t get my foot into the door of without starting at a very entry-level role with a very entry level salary. Not gonna work.

Stay in Construction?

For now, this seems like it makes the most sense. I’m not excited about starting all over as a new-hire; (I’ve only done it a couple of times in my entire career). But I’m hopeful there’s an opportunity at an organization similar in size to my last job where I can make an out-sized impact. I’ve been mulling it over quite a bit with my time-off and I think it is a big motivation for me to work for someone who is capable in seeing value in their team-members and giving them autonomy to work on the kinds of problems that eclipse the day-to-day tasks. For some reason, in every role, I’ve found myself dissecting the workflows, identifying the pain-points and problem areas and exploring new ideas to try to alleviate or eliminate them. I tend to get bored of repetition and look for ways to automate, optimize, reduce and refactorize. Yes, these are buzzwords, but they are real strategies and I believe that with technology advancing at the pace it is today, more than ever before, there exists an opportunity in every organization to modernize, and find new ways to increase efficiency or deliver a better product or service. It’s business after all. These are the core tenets of any capitalist entity. Reduce costs -or - increase value (or both)= greater profit. This is the way.

def capitalism(resources, time, revenue): 
"""
floor[resources] and ceiling[revenue] = > profit++
"""

So I know there’s opportunity out there. I found those opportunities at my last role and solved several of them! (I’ll write up another post on that stuff, too at some point.) I’m actively networking now, to find a company that is looking for a talented, self-motivated, fast-learning, collaborative person to add to their team, and is an organization that is looking toward the future and oriented for growth.

In the mean-time…

This blog / web-page / portfolio. My recent motivation to get this going again was because I found myself having to update my resume over and over in the last couple of weeks as I was applying for various roles and at the same time, I’ve been sweeping through old hard-drives and finding photos and documents from over the years and decided I wanted to create a place to document those projects for myself and showcase them for my family, and (possibly) a potential future employer or anyone who shares the same ideas or interests and wants to collaborate. So I’ll be trying to keep up on this as much as I can.

Conclusion

I think this first post has given you a good summary of what’s to come. I’ve started a TODO list of pages I’ll add to document past projects and expand on my work history and blog post ideas for the future. If you have any specific questions or ideas you’d like me to write about I’m open to suggestions - send me a message at: [email protected]