"Redd up" is Pittsburghese for "making ready", or "cleaning up because company is coming over". As someone raised principally in the South the phrase isn't a favorite of mine, but it fits so I'm using it here.

I've been blogging for a long time, a little over 22 years as I write this. I started in 2003, originally on sites like DotNetJunkies and ASPAlliance before hosting my own blog. Since I was a .NET developer in those days, I used platforms like dagBlog, BlogEngine.NET and a couple others in the same genre. I loved playing with the platforms as much as I enjoyed blogging, relishing each platform migration. It was fun, and great experience. My wife owned a flower shop at the time, and I ran the blogs for her also. Eventually I hosted a site for florist blogs, attracting a dozen or so other florists and attracting over 500,000 page views per month (a big deal in the mid-aughts). We were featured on the covers of industry magazines, and I spoke at conferences about blogging. It was quite a thing. But time erodes interests--we closed the flower shop and wound down the florist blogs, just leaving my one little site.

Over the years I had used a number of tools to write posts, switching from the platform's editor to tools like Windows Live Writer (now https://openlivewriter.com/). Eventually, though, I settled on WordPress because (at least in its early days) it was simple to operate and didn't require a lot of effort to keep running.

As my career progressed, I found myself blogging less and less. I think a lot of the reason is that as a senior engineer I was doing things which were so edge case they weren't worth writing about, or so secret sauce I couldn't write about them. But that's changing.

My career arc has been molecular biologist => software developer => technical evangelist => software engineer => data architect => cloud platform architect => enterprise architect => data engineer. I've published peer-reviewed scientific papers, one of the first books about Microsoft Azure, delivered over 100 presentations at 70+ technical conferences (not to mention scientific symposia and florist conventions), and written a couple hundred blog posts.

As I reflect on that arc, I see a lot of cruft--papers in a career I no longer participate in, a very out of date book, and blog posts for long outdated technologies. I don't think I need all those posts about the version of Crystal Reports embedded with VS 2003 and .NET 1.1. I'm sentimental about them, but it's time to clean up the posts and make this blog useful.

Which brings me to now. I'm writing this post in Markdown, using VS Code, and I'll generate a static site using a tool called Pelican. It feels de-evolutionary, and I think I finally grok what the band Devo was all about.

A new platform, and new subjects to write about--do I feel like I'm starting over? YES! And I love it. There are a handful of older posts which I'll convert, but the rest will stay in an archived database, languishing in some cloud's blob storage until my heirs no longer renew the plan (or free tier for eternity).

I'm still a big believer in the usefulness of blogs. A way to share stories about something I've learned or something I've done. I've been helped tremendously in my career by the blogs of others, and I hope this blog is useful to someone. One thing you'll never see here is a post written by AI. Authenticity and experience are very important to me, so that's what you'll get. For better or for worse, these posts are all my words and experiences.

Thanks for visiting!

Rich

P.S. Remember blog comments, backlinks and trackbacks? Good times.