A Return to Blogging

Today, I make my return to blogging without any real fanfare barring a little personal pomp.

A Little History

Before joining my current organization, I used to have a blog and technical postings, open source libraries, and accounts on all sorts of developer pages. Then I reluctantly signed an intellectual property agreement and was told that we keep what we do to ourselves and that it was frowned upon by traditional mindset employees to do anything otherwise.

That position now is “old-school” and I’m told that is no longer the case, though the last time I checked, that is indeed still the formal rule. Regardless, with management support, I march on and start anew. That’s the tricky part about rules and culture, especially when it’s changing. By leaders in the company (at least those I chose to point to as validation), we’re now told it’s OK to act as industry leaders, share information, and actually be visible.

I recognize that it sounds absurd enough, but it is exactly the opposite of what it was before. There were actual bets made around my longevity at the org before I couldn't take it and simply rolled out of the place. While the situation was complicated and my internal drive to fix things kept me motivated, they were right from day one.

My original deletion of my digital self is probably one the dumber things I did and really the most definitive example I can point to where I denied myself for an organization, which is not only something I don’t pine to do but something I don’t plan on doing again. It not only slowed the amount of people I met online for projects or hobbies, but it ultimately diminished the appearance of my expertise. Now, I'm respected and my career is just peachy at work, but to the general public or someone wondering “Is he any good or just full of it?”, it absolutely is the case.

The refreshing part is that after years of warning, my organization seems to have a fire lit underneath it. It appears that people understand the world doesn’t wait for them, others are passing us by, and we can’t recruit plenty of good people to join our org or have a reasonable retention rate if someone ends up in a part of the company that rolls on Access databases or windows Server 2008. That's a lot less fun than supercomputers and mobile, which are both just as prevalent. Enterprises are funny that way.

The Part You Probably Care About

I could ramble on and on, but ultimately, I lay this out for a couple of reason:

1. You won’t find my old tech articles on here relevant to things 2014 and earlier. That’s both a personal decision and one made for me by lost data
2. I need a little venting to explain my absence from the cyber world in a period where big data and internet permanence became reality
3. It sets the expectation that I’m not ranting about pop culture, politics, or personal matters. It’s a tech site with my opinions. That’s it. It exists for professionalism and for sharing things that I think are interesting or useful with others and are at least tangentially related to IT professionals

So, finally: Hello again!
Lee