First Post!

Hello world! This is my first post, and I'd like to use it to introduce myself and say a little about why I'm starting this blog.

My name is Ken, and I'm a full-stack web developer. As of writing this article, I live and work in Denver, Colorado. I work primarily with Node and .NET on the back end, and whatever JavaScript framework happens to be in vogue this year on the front end (currently React).

Why I built this blog

Early in my career, I had done mostly back-end work and I wanted to start developing my front-end skillset. I used to get really frustrated whenever I would start a new web project because, although I could always build a really cool single page app on top of a very well-designed REST API, the site itself would always look like garbage because I just didn't know how to do web design.

So I decided to build a website (this blog) from scratch so I could learn. This blog was originally a sort of study project: I wanted to build a website by myself, without any third-party CSS libraries or frameworks like Bootstrap, and without copying anyone else's designs. I even wanted to make my own logo and icons so I could get familiar with Adobe Illustrator and other tools designers use to make graphics for the web.

That was a couple of years ago. It has been through several iterations since then and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

Why blog at all?

So, that’s why I built this website in the first place. After I was done, it sat in a Bitbucket repo for months – alongside the dozen or so other repos containing projects I got to 80% done but never quite all the way. Lately I’ve been doing a lot of thinking on why I can never seem to finish any of my personal projects, and I think I’ve figured it out: creativity needs an audience. Given the 80:20 rule, why should I commit to the tedious, time-consuming remaining 20% of all these projects if I’ll never get to show them off to anyone?

From now on, I’m going to start publishing pretty much everything I build in my own time on this blog. I think that having an audience will help keep me accountable to my own goals, and help me actually finish things instead of stopping when I feel like I’ve finished most of the fun stuff.