New year, new blog.

For someone who has been so deeply interested in web design and "cutting edge" web technologies since before I can remember, it has certainly taken me far too long to finally build my personal website.

Perhaps that was a bit unfair, as I'd previously had a living, breathing blog when I was a teenager where I would blog about, well, things that teenagers blog about. And prior to that, who could forget the geocities sites that we all started with. But I don't really count those.

For the better half of the decade, I've been wanting to get more serious about building a proper personal website. Partly to (professionally, I suppose) showcase my work, partly so to have an online place to call home, but mostly just because I need a canvas to channel my curiousity about all these new web technologies, techniques, and frameworks that are coming out faster than we can count them; and clearly, work or building examples for the purpose of learning can only really get you so far.

Plot twist

So here we are today, when I've finally started (and hopefully finish) writing the first real content of alanquach.com. I can attribute this small step to my stark realization that all these years, I've simply been guilty of one of my biggest pet peeves: attempting to build some complete masterpiece, refusing to go live with anything less than that grand vision and failing to achieve even a sliver of something useful.

Allow me to elaborate.

Every step along the way, I had wanted to:

• Build some crazy extravagant Flash project, because Flash was cool
• Come up with my own PHP/MySQL blogging system with comments and stuff, because I could
• Or build from scratch a Node.js framework to [see above bullet]

I was doing waterfall!!! Once I had realized that, the solution was simple. And it was something I've been preaching all along anyways:

• Plan well (but don't go overboard)
• Divide into SMART chunks and prioritize
• Ship. Ship fast.

Sound familiar? If you're familiar with agile, then it should.

So while I have some grand plans for what will become of this website or blog, I was still able to go live with something in less than a day's time. And now that I've gotten the ball rolling, I can't wait to pack some real fun stuff into it.

It's highly unlikely that you'll be reading this post in it's original incarnation, so just use your imagination as I describe it to you... it's pure HTML markup, no CSS, no fonts, rendered in Times New Roman. (or you can checkout my initial commit)

It's going to be a great year.