Starting Point

Rewind four years. I was a biology instructor, secure in my knowledge and the information that I was teaching. Why wouldn’t I be? I studied biology in undergrad and grad school and was a Teaching Assistant for three years during grad school. All this training led me down the path to the classroom and gave me the confidence I needed to succeed.

Four years into it I made a huge leap and moved into front-end development (that’s a longer post for another day). With the switch also came a change in my status from teacher back to being a student. As a student, I’ve learned from blogs, books, friends, people I’ve worked with and my own experiments and personal projects. What I haven’t done is engage with the larger web community. The drop in status back to student brought with it the insecurities of thinking everyone knows more than you, even after years of working and studying. And that change was much harder on me than I thought it would be. I was scared to put myself out there and try to add to the discussion.

During a conversation last week, I realized that it’s time for me to get past that feeling of just being a student and push my role forward again. I’m good at what I do and have ideas and thoughts I’d like to share and discuss. To do that, I need to start engaging with others in our field, experimenting more and sharing the results of those experiments.

So this is the starting point. A while back, I toyed with the idea of starting the blog (mainly because I felt like I had too). I worked on some designs but nothing was quite right. I didn’t want to put it up until I had a design I thought was perfect, so I punted. I’d just sit on it for a while and do it later. And I was happy to, because, as I’ve explained, I was a little scared to put myself out there and didn’t really want to do it anyway. Since I’ve finally made the decision to just let go, I decided to make a few quick modifications to a theme so it fits with my current site and start writing. I’ll be tweaking and modifying this design as I go, because it’s not perfect and there are a lot of things I’d like to change. If you see things that are a little out of whack (and there are bound to be some), let me know. I’m glad to finally be joining in and hope I can add a few interesting bits to the interwebs.