Yesterday was my last day at Vanu. I jumped without a new job or really even much of a career plan beyond “stop doing this NOW,” so it looks like I’m going to have some long, uninterrupted free time for the first time since graduating from high school. It’s a bit of a scary place to be, particularly in the current economy, but I’m feeling energized by the freedom (and the fear) in a way that I haven’t been since leaving MIT to help found Vanu, Inc. ten years ago. In the last year or so at the company, I’d stopped growing in a lot of ways, and now I’m looking forward to taking advantage of this adrenaline rush to reverse that trend.
Keeping a blog is one of those things that I’ve been vaguely interested in for a while. I’ve even gone so far as install WordPress a couple of times, but after struggling through writing an initial “gosh, I’m blogging” post, it was painfully obvious that I wasn’t going to have the energy and the motivation to break through to the point where it became even a semi-regular habit. Will I succeed this time? I certainly hope so, but I’m finally at a point where even a few months’ worth of forced writing followed by complete fail seems like a worthwhile experiment rather than a waste of time.
I have no idea what I’m going to write about for three months (possibly a bad sign). My initial expectation is that it will be some twisted cross between a journal of my unemployment, random ramblings about what to do next career-wise, and hopefully some coherent (and dare we wish for insightful?) commentary based on whatever development projects I’m working on. When first pondering this project, I had illusions of cranking something out every day, but I’m feeling like two or three posts a week is going to be more realistic, at least until I get my non-documentation writing chops back. Also, I’d like it to be funny, but I’ll settle for amusing.