Just put your best foot forward

Don't over analyze. This personal project is about discovering the value in taking action and moving forward.

Credit: Joshua Aragon / unsplash.com
Credit: Joshua Aragon / unsplash.com

What took me so long to finally put something together? I didn’t need it, until I did.

Defining the problem

I’m looking for my next opportunity and want to make sure I can prove that I still have what it takes. Where do I start? How do you create an effective technical resume when most of your experience is client-owned deliverables?

Gathering the facts

  • I’m a problem solver at heart. I’ve played many different roles at companies. Title did not matter. I love being able to help others succeed by sharing my experience and knowledge with them
  • Programming is my hobby, and web development has always been a huge passion of mine. It’s not just about the satisfaction you get from creating something new or seeing your projects succeed; it also gives me time to think logically.
  • I want to be an entrepreneur. The idea of designing and building something from scratch just seems like fun. The irony is people often don’t seek to be entrepreneurs, they just sort of fall into it.
  • I’m not the best at remembering things. That’s why I like to research and distill information in a way so that it is easy for me to remember!
  • I’ve helped many people successfully navigate through tough times. We’ll work together to identify your goals and create an action plan to achieve them.
  • Mom says I’m good at what I do ❤.

Consider all the possibilities and create an action plan

I need to SEO myself into existence. Maybe people do care what my random shower thoughts are. Even if some projects are old or now broken, I should share them for posterity!

To attract the technical minds, I will create a personal blog and share code so they can see how (un)commonly we design our products.

Creative minds deserve quality content, so I’ll try my best to keep things clean and intuitive without too many distractions. My posts are going be entertaining but also educational with simple language that anyone can understand.

Create the MVP! I want to start with just the basics - no frills or extras yet. The idea here is that I can test out my ideas quickly, and if they’re not working then simple solutions will do before spending too much effort on something more complicated than necessary.

Implement the plan

Making this site live! I’m so excited to share my first post with you. ElderJS and TailwindCSS are used for faster development of ideas because they have great features like SSR, responsiveness, partial hydration (I could go on). As updates happen I’ll keep a changelog documenting those changes—and notify through the bell at top right corner.

Observe the results

Currently Google doesn’t even know about me. Let’s see how long it takes for this site to rank. It will be some time before I can return to this post with updates on the status of my experiment.

Update - 2/4/2022

I am on the 8th page of Google and on the first page of Bing. What if I changed my meta description a bit?

Visits as of 1/21/2022:

A lot of bots coming through. I haven’t even submitted to search engines yet.

Page Visits as of 1/21/2022

Google results as of 1/18/2022:

Google rank as of 1/18/2022