Life on the Internet
I’m back!
I started blogging at pocketuniverse.ca more than ten years ago. In the time since I stopped blogging I’ve worked at four companies: Wave Accounting, Security Compass, Points and Opus One Solutions. Tomorrow I start at the fifth, Shopify.
Of course, I wasn’t the only one who abandoned their blog. We migrated our personal thoughts to Facebook and our morsels of wit to Twitter (and presumably did something with Snapchat or Tiktok if you’re not an old like me.) But then, more recently, I quit Facebook. And then I quit Twitter. I haven’t kicked my Instagram habit yet, but I feel like it’s inevitable.
At the same time, I went from being a developer to a manager. It made the matter of keeping a blog feel like professional failing. The guilt of it began to accumulate like radiation poisoning (is that too grim? “Like mercury in a tuna”? “Like whatever my dog keeps in his anal glands”? Sorry.) Being a manager means being a leader. Growing as a leader. Encouraging others to grow as leaders themselves. And moreover, doing this job keeps giving me thoughts, and like my dog’s glands, these thoughts need to be expressed from time to time.
One last ingredient: that new job. Shopify. I’ve heard Shopify described as the anti-Amazon. Nobody buys their stuff on shopify.com. Nobody’s even heard of shopify.com. Instead, people go to some website and buy stuff from it, and it happens to be Shopify that does the plumbing. Now I’m writing this in the last hours of my not really knowing what Shopify’s like as a company or how it works. Maybe I’ll look back at this as rosy nonsense. But right now I think I get it.
Anyone can have a website. Even me. A professional facilitator of making things be on the web.
So here I am. I’ve only just managed to push this thing online a little too late at night, and it still needs a lot of work. And what will I write about? Work? Anything but work? How will I write? With clickbait and stuff? With authority and chutzpah?
Who knows. It feels good just to prove to myself that the Internet still allows for dumb little websites and I can still make them.