On the internet, nobody knows you’re a toaster.
Nobody.
Except I’m not a toaster, let alone a ballistic one anymore; I haven’t used that handle online with the exception of my Twitch channel and apart from recycling this gag from my last blog, I’m still only a freelance mobile/web developer in my mid-late twenties with enough time on his hands to start yet another blog talking about stuff I’ve worked on and/or things I find interesting enough to write about. It’s a pitch I’ve made before and one that didn’t pan out on my old website. If this were a few years ago, I’d have wrote up some contrived sob-story about how I had a lot to work on or schoolwork being a time-consuming hassle but the truth is much simpler:
I had absolutely zero interest in updating the website with new content.
I’m hesitant to call it writer’s block because that sounds like a cop-out to excuse myself from doing something I’m responsible for. Last I checked, writer’s block applies to writers and I’m hesitant to call myself one if I’m not doing any writing. If I wasn’t working on a project or had a completed one that I thought was worth talking about, chances are good I abandoned that idea for a new post really quickly. It’s been three years since I last published a blog post of any kind, the last one dating back to 2017 and this self-imposed pigeon-hole approach to content creation hasn’t been doing me any favors because it’s made me lose touch with the thing I enjoyed doing most before I began teaching myself how to code back in college.
Before I wrote my first “Hello World” program, I was an avid writer. In part because I wanted to follow in my brother’s footsteps and mostly because I had a natural talent for it. I’d write reviews for movies I watched, discussed controversial endings to a game I played the hell out of, and short stories about whatever came to mind for no one else other than myself. There was even a time when I was planning out an entire novel and actively looking into a degree in journalism for my undergrad.
Looking back, the story of my novel sucked and my plans to start my career as a journalist were half-baked ideas still stuck in the planning phase, much like the novel that would never emerge from that state. Hell, anyone can plan out an entire novel but to actually write the damn thing is another thing entirely. Save for a handful of essays, a couple seminars, and a dissertation during my undergrad, I effectively dropped writing and focused on becoming a freelance developer with the odd blog post here and there for some of the projects I’ve worked on.
The time I spent learning new programming languages, design methodologies, and working on projects by myself or with other developers across the various gigs I had were some of the most engrossing learning experiences I’ve had, but the spark to write about more than my career has returned and I want to strike while the iron is hot. The posts you’re going to see on this site are going to be a lot more varied than they were before, ranging from opinion pieces, events I’ve attended, development notes, projects I’ve worked on/am working on, short stories, past writing, recipes, troubleshooting, and other musings that will cover a wide swath of topics beyond technology.
For the first time in a long while, I’m excited to take up this craft again and I hope you enjoy some stuff that’s in the pipeline when they’re posted to this website in the very near future.
This continues- finally- in a website with my own name.
Adam Khafagy.