This post is a work in progress. Maybe all my posts are works in progress. As a human being I certainly am a work in progress.

When I was a junior in high school I remember my friends and I had a group “weblog”. Weblogging was new then. It was purely public journaling then. Since then it’s become primarily a marketing exercise. A way to build a personal brand or a corporate brand. Years of thinking of myself as a representative of either a big tech company or a small firm have conditioned me to put incredible pressure on everything I say in public. Any muddled messaging can instantly cause chaos. A flood of angry comments and corrections.

But my blog isn’t a corporate blog and I want to get back to blogging being a low stakes form of expression. At times I consider that maybe my blog should just be a discord transcript, lol.

I’m so afraid of questions. Or afraid of arguments? Or just tired of convincing people of things. Of anything actually, not just technical things.

I’m going to restructure this place. I think maybe the time-based labeling makes me embarrassed when there are such long gaps between posts. Maybe this should be a non-deterministic publication of articles and essays.

I think there’s a bit of confusion between 4 or 5 brands that I need to separate out for clarity.

1. Anthony <– that’s me. May want to talk about tech, or recreation, or health, or maybe philosophy and religion.
2. ModVB a personal project I work on primarily to fulfill a creative imperative that I would like to share with other VB lovers for their consideration.
3. Other tools I want to share that have no dependency on ModVB.
4. Educational materials about software development.
5. VB community info.

This is mostly important for urls and GitHub orgs. I have a bunch and I need to use them more clearly. Believe it or not the original title for this blog wasn’t… my name. It was something loftier but I didn’t think it was a good idea to launch that domain without more content.

Whatever my productivity problem is, this year I need to find or create systems that let me be productive without a lot of activation costs. For instance, the ModVB nugget/vsix feed never gets updated because the process of building those packages with the appropriate metadata is manual. I never set up a CI/CD process for it and that should happen.

It’s not that my thinking on these topics is as erratic as my writing. I just can’t figure out how to get the mature revised experience-based stuff inside my head out. I don’t know why. I’ve always been articulate. So pardon the babbling and stream of consciousness. I’m trying to do things differently this year and see if I get different results.

I want to post again about power as it applies to tech.

Regards,

-ADG