from Consumer to Producer

This is the obligatory first post of the blog, so let me explain the intention.

I've been working with the Web for 15 years, starting down at the University of Illinois in the very early days before Netscape was formed and you couldn't center text on a page. I've seen the technology evolve, and how regular business has been affected. And it keeps changing.

Which brings me to my point: I've been one heck of a consumer of all of this information, and can't take in anymore without spitting some back out. Thus, I'm transforming into a producer. It's easy to consume things...food, television, books. It's much harder to produce. Sure, I've created some sites here and there, but you can tell they haven't gotten a lot of loving attention.

That's because as an engineer by nature, I'm good at putting things together to solve a problem. Once there are no more obstacles, there are people that are better suited to making the trains run on time, all day every day. That's just a simple fact of different personality types.

But I've also learned that it's a matter of perspective; that I can hack my life to create new challenges for my engineering mind to tackle. There are a plethora of problems that I can uniquely attack with my strengths to get the job done. For instance: it's a problem that I don't have a blog. I could keep waiting for the right platform or technology to come along to fix a piece of the puzzle that I may not have liked, or I can just use the most straightforward tool to do the job and solve the problem, at least for now.

So this blog will be my outlet to share things I know, think, and do. The term "Web Producer" isn't widely used, but it's the best way I can think of to describe the epitome of someone who understands, lives, and breathes the Web. They can make things happen, create things, and put things together. I consider myself to be one and if you're reading this I'll bet you are one too.