Why I'm Back

It has been three years since I last posted here. That is longer than I intended, and longer than I am comfortable admitting.

The honest version is that life got in the way in the ways it tends to. The final stretch at my previous employer was demanding in the way that final stretches often are: a lot happening, not much spare capacity, and blogging slipping steadily down the priority list until it disappeared from it entirely.

Then came the redundancy.

That is a story I will be telling in more detail over the coming weeks, because it deserves more than a paragraph. What I will say here is that it was significant, it was unexpected, and it changed the shape of the last year in ways I am still processing. If that is something you have been through, or are going through, I hope what I write about it is useful. If it is not something you have experienced, I hope it gives you a window into what it actually looks and feels like from the inside.

After the redundancy came a new role, and with it a gradual return of the headspace that the previous couple of years had consumed. Not immediately. Settling into something new takes time and energy. But steadily. And with the headspace came the urge to write again.

There is something else too. I genuinely enjoyed putting content out there. Finding that something I had learned or worked through was useful to someone else: that is a good feeling, and I missed it. I am looking forward to having the time and space to do that again.

The other thing that has changed is how I work. I now have a setup that makes getting ideas out of my head and into a publishable form significantly less painful than it used to be. I will be writing about that in detail next week, because I think it is genuinely useful for anyone who wants to write regularly but finds the process of doing so gets in the way of the thinking. The short version is: voice capture, a proper note-taking system, and an automated publishing pipeline that removes the friction between having something to say and it going live.

That pipeline is why this post exists today rather than sitting in a drafts folder indefinitely.

So: I am back. I have a lot to write about. Some of it is personal, some of it is technical, and some of it sits in the space between the two where I find the most interesting conversations tend to happen.

Next week I will be writing about the workflow that makes all of this possible: the tools and the process that turned blogging from something I kept meaning to do into something I can actually sustain. The week after that, the redundancy. That story deserves its own space, and it will get it.

I hope you will stick around for it.