Random musings to kick us off

This post is in effect a more fuller 'hello world' test of the first stage of my indieweb setup. Its not going to syndicate to anywhere that has followers, so if you got here, hello. Thanks for dropping by. Hopefully there'll be more here, and more interesting things at that, going forward.

Anyway, in terms of what this space is going to be about - some background: I've had chats with coaches and trusted individuals about a path forward in my career and they hit on what one of them termed 'Personal Eminence'. The dictionary defines eminence as a “position of prominence or superiority.”

Oooh, I'm not sure about the prominence or superiority.... I'm a shy guy.

I'm also not sure about making it just about the career. I don't like defining myself by 'work', really. But certainly, talking about Tech, and Java things might show off what I might be deemed an expert in.

In a nutshell, I do just need to get myself out there, in general, not just in career things. I tend to shy away from just talking about what I'm working on, or interested in, assuming that it pales in comparison to everyone elses big brains and big ideas. So when I sit at a gathering of industry peers, yeh, theres people there who've known me for years but who don't quite know what I'm about, save from a general idea of who I work for, and that I've a lot of gadgets...

Given a lot of my interests outside of work are in media, the internet and its impact, digital sovereignty and the likes - I really need to practice what I preach. I want there to be better ways forward here and I need to be showing how things can be done.

Could also be good for the mental health, I do have that tendency to shy away, as mentioned, and when things aren't going great that just gets worse. I'm not going to replace therapy with a blog, but at the same time, maybe I just get some rants out there. Maybe I'm not the only one pissed off with how things are. Anyway, yeh, thats an area I have to be careful with, but at the same time I'm not going to be ashamed or avoid it entirely.

In any case, my intention right now is to take one night a week, block it out, and just start adding to a bunch of articles I'm working on in parallel until one gets to a point of being reasonably complete ready. Or at the bare minimum, just spend 30 mins tapping about something and hitting the post button. If its not relevant to most audiences, fine, I'll just not syndicate that direction. I'm also going to resist the trend to wait until something is perfect. Rough can still be good, those edges can be chipped off and understanding refined later.

I'm trying to follow the Indieweb/POSSE way of doing things for this one, and I'll have something more to say on that later. I'll be posting here first, syndicating to wherever makes sense for a particular post. Probably Linkedin for anything that comes under the umbrella of things I can get paid for, mastodon for most techie things, possibly one or two focused blogs/mediums/substacks for other topics I'm generally interested in. At the very least I will try not to cross the streams and put something relating to mental health in the linkedin, or talk about the transhumanist topics to my political audience. Unless it makes sense.

Yes, I will be using AI, but not for article generation. Research, code snippets, examples and reviewing what I've created are generally what I stick to. I'm not convinced that LLMs can ethically be used for direct expressive and artistic creation, given, well, they're trained on real peoples art. Perhaps more on the topic later.

In any case, my 30 mins are up for tonight. Lets start building this bit by bit and see where it goes.