“Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well”
-Philip Stanhope
It has been just one week since I decided to dive back into software development. I have rediscovered an old passion! As a retiring Marine, husband, and father I was looking at leveraging my deep leadership and project management experience as my first civilian job. I figured that would provide a smooth transition for the family as many things will change for us. Software development and engineering in general has been a passion for me since I was a kid. My plan was to slowly work back to that through night school over the next 3-4 years.
However, after honest reflection and discussions with the family we realized that we are in a good spot to manage the transition without me having to take just a “job”. That was just over a week ago. Since that time I have revised our family plans and accelerated my return to software development. I don’t know how long it will take for me to rejuvenate and expand skills I haven’t needed for over 20 years, but I’m all in now! I still value all the hard work and experiences that made me grow as a Leader and Project Manager, but if I want to leverage those strengths within the industry of my passion I need to rehab and expand my skills. I want to be value added to a software development team so I have a lot of work to do to get there.
So now what? After talking with professionals and researching approaches, many in the industry recommended starting a Blog or Vlog. After some brainstorming and planning I decided that would be a great first project. In addition it is a good way to capture and share the journey. My hope is it will keep me honest and shape an environment that fosters collaboration and growth with anyone that crosses my path.
For the near term, I will do my best to capture my progress and foster an environment for collaboration via weekly blog posts with the goal of expanding across other social media platforms in the future. Once the website is polished enough for initial release, I will expand to integrate weekly Vlogs via YouTube.
Anyway, back to work on the site. There is a lot of learning, creating, evaluating, and iterating to do. Thank you for stopping by!
-Dan the Code Raider