I’m back! That means getting things back in order. When I was last writing actively I was using Medium… which was pretty miserable. Medium was great for ease of use with a decent writing interface and app as well as excellent reader acquisition. Unfortunately the upsides had worse downsides. Formatting was limited (no tables?!) and everything was like when I used Jekyll but sort of weird. Then came the lock-in/paywalls and general lack of openness. 👎 ...
Impostor syndrome can be defined as a collection of feelings of inadequacy that persist even in face of information that indicates that the opposite is true. It is experienced internally as chronic self-doubt, and feelings of intellectual fraudulence. Imposter Syndrome ~ The CalTech Counseling Center There isn’t an easy way to start a post like this and there doesn’t need to be. Imposter Syndrome is something most people don’t know a lot about (I’d never heard the idea until I started working at GitHub) but it’s something everyone is intimately familiar with. ...
Update: Yeah… Jekyll was great and I had a lot of fun with it, but I’ve since moved off it to Medium. There’s lots of cool stuff you can do with Jekyll, but in the end the need to develop posts with a text editor and a Ruby environment lost out to a convenient iOS app. So it’s been more days than I’d like since my last blog, sadly since I’ve been dealing with some discomfort in my arms along the lines of an RSI, something I plan on discussing more. That said I’m on the mend, and wanted at least a small post so I don’t feel like such a slacker. ...
I’m a big believer in mentoring. Classes are great, self learning is hugely important, but there are few things that help someone grow as much as having someone a little bit farther down the road to give a little bit of guidance. I’ve been lucky enough throughout my life to have had many mentors in a number of aspects of my career and life. These people have been invaluable. I’m not the only one. A few months ago Coby Chapple, one of GitHub’s amazing designers, did a talk at a company event about the importance of mentoring, based on the Distributed Mentoring movement. Coby even put his code where his mouth is, adding a page to his personal site stating his support of mentoring and offering to mentor those who put themselves out there and email him. Going a step further he even made it easy for others to follow his lead by forking his mentoring repo creating a mentoring page of your own. ...
So after a lot of harassment by the likes of Ben Balter and some other GitHubber’s I’ve decided it’s a good time to learn Jekyll and GitHub Pages, along with the wonderful Hyde library for style points, and start a blog. I’ve largely been terrible about blogging, but frankly I think I’ve never had quite such a good handle on what interests me and how to talk about it, so here’s hoping this one goes better. ...