Well its been a while since I last posted and there are a few reasons. Firstly the most obvious reason is that with covid taking over the world life got a little crazy with clients reorganizing staffing and workloads changing. On top of that I just lost the motivation to keep posting, which is something I think everyone can relate to with constant lockdowns and the never ending litany of bad news.

When it rains it pours

This january though I had planned to get back on schedule and started writing again; then my server crashed in a pretty spectacular way. Despite my best efforts I was not able to get it back to a stable condition and lost about a months worth of draft articles. Fortunately I had recent backups made of my database so I didnt lose too much in the way of work but it was a frustrating setback.

Looking on the bright side

They say every cloud has a silver lining and this cloud was no different since it gave me the kick up the rear I needed to finish building my new more powerful replacement server :) which went online the weekend before last. I'm still working through my checklist but I think all the big ticket items are fixed and I also took the time to upgrade to the latest version of FW/1 so win win.

Whats Next

Well now that I have the server back online I've started thinking about the future of this blog in general. I don't have everything decided yet but here are a few of my thoughts.

Firstly its not been obvious but I'm not doing much cfml development anymore. The last 2+ years I've been transitioning to React development. In fact the last few weeks getting this blog back online has been the most cfml I've touched in over a year (other than working on FW/1). While I still enjoy cf as a backend language I've really come to enjoy React development. Also I've started to get more interested in Go and I've been dabbling with it on and off for a while now. I think this year my focus is going to be more on that.

Beyond moving away from cfml, I've also been finding that I don't have as much drive to post about technology as I used to. Im not decided yet but I'm considering changing the focus of this blog to my other interests maybe photography, sailing or just as a place to vent about the never ending stupidity of humans. As it says on the front, this site is subject to frequent changes.

Dont throw out the baby with the bath water

Never fear though, I wont be deleting all my tech articles. Something that has annoyed me over the years is finding someone rebuilt their blog after a career change and that really useful article that solves my problem is now gone and I have to go digging in the wayback machine in hopes of finding it. If I do change focus what I will most likely do is split all my technology posts into a technology subdomain with a 301 redirect. This is if I make the change.

For now though I think I've rambled on long enough, so hope everyone's 2021 goes better than the last year.

p.s. You may have noticed I took some time to do a little cleanup of the site. It's amazing how just deleting things makes for a cleaner experience.