About ten years ago, I stopped publishing.
Before that, I was building things offline and online for a while. I helped organize meetups, made a programming podcast (Fun fact: it reached No. 3 in Spain on a random weekend and never made it back to the top again), and shipped a few little developer tools people shared: a TDD Tamagotchi and a pair-programming game. I also made videos about TDD and frontend, talked at a few conferences, and made covers for ebooks.
Some of those sites are gone now. I didn’t take good care of them, and it hurts to rely on the Wayback Machine to recover even part of that work.
Then I became a father, and the posts, talks, plugins, and podcast episodes stopped. Raising my first child took all the time and attention I could give it. Whatever remained after work belonged at home, not to be shared in public. Without quite deciding to, I made a trade: one job, one family, and no audience to maintain.
I’d make the same trade again.
Going quiet changed how I worked. Without the need to narrate the work, I could stay with it. Over the next decade, I grew into a role where I could help turn fuzzy ideas into work we could ship on a schedule. Without a thread to write or a talk to prepare, I had time to get better at the work itself.
Staying focused raised my standards. Working on the same product year after year meant living with my decisions. Anything sloppy was still there the next day.
A few years later, I had my second child. They’re both older now, and there’s room to make things in public again. I’ve missed launching projects, writing about them, drawing, talking about programming and design.
So I’m publishing again.
There won’t be a grand relaunch. I want to pick up where I left off: take a confusing topic, make it clear and fun, and put it where people can find it.
If we worked together back then, say hi. I’ve missed this.