My reflection and introspection mode gets turned up to 11 at the end of each year, so I’ve been mulling over 2022 and how I want to spend 2023. Last year this kind of reflection led me to commit to meditating more regularly. In a couple of days I’ll have practiced meditation every day for a year. This year, I’m going to make some similar changes. For starters, I’ve decided to drop Instagram, caffeine, and alcohol, at least for a year. I’ll miss you, morning coffee.

This post isn’t about what’s changing in my personal life, though. It’s about where I’m going with this website. With the rise of Mastodon and ongoing train wreck that is Twitter, there’s been renewed conversation about “owning your own data”.

I don’t think we’re about to see a revolution in how the average person uses the Internet, but there has definitely been a shift in many communities. I’m happy to see more people realizing that you don’t need to have a huge following to move your content off of the major content sites and on to something you have a little more control over. This shift isn’t for everyone, but it is for nerds like me. I hope more people seize the opportunity.

To that end, I’m beefing up my focus on this website. You’re soon going to see more short form commentary posted here, with coverage of what’s going on in the Ruby and Rails communities. This is because I see some gaps.

Ruby used to have more of a focus on weird. We used to even have a conference about it. As the community has matured, we’ve seen the discourse around the language shift away from that. It’s by no means gone, though, so my goal is to shine a light on the people who are still doing weird and wonderful things with the language. Maybe that will encourage more of that kind of thing.

Additionally, I hope to gather together links to best Ruby resources out there and augment that corpus with the pieces I find to be missing. We’ve got a wealth of intermediate Ruby and Rails resources available to us, but there’s a very limited amount about how to go beyond that, and I’m not talking about along the career ladder.

That’s my plan. I hope you’ll join me on this journey. I’ve got a big project wrapping up early in the new year, so don’t expect too much here before February, but then it’s game on.

Keep it weird, friends. ✌️