Welcome to the very first post on my shiny new blog. My name is Jack Gannon, and I am a designer and developer based in Phoenix, Arizona. This blog will focus mainly on User Experience (UX) Design, User Interface (UI) Design, Web Development, and technology in general. I’ll also be sharing some personal stories, experiences, and viewpoints. Whether you are a seasoned member of the tech community, or someone who is just getting started in the tech industry, chances are there will be something here for you to enjoy.
For my first blog post, I just wanted to address some of my motivations behind creating this blog. A great deal of effort went into planning and building this blog, and I wanted to make sure that I was blogging for all of the right reasons. When putting tremendous effort into anything, I always strongly recommend discovering and examining your “Why”. After much self-reflection, here are the five reasons that I came up with as to why I am starting my blog:
1. Knowledge Sharing
I, by no means, consider myself an expert. I make mistakes daily. I make it a point to fail often. That being said, I try as hard as I can to treat every failure or mistake as an opportunity to learn something new and grow from it.
I’ve reached the point in my career where I have failed (and consequently learned) a lot. I owe a lot of that to online blogs and learning materials. The amount of free, high-quality content that exists only a few clicks of the mouse away is mindblowing. Despite having a tech-related degree, I taught myself most of what I know through these awesome online educational resources and some Google-Fu.
Thanks to this wealth of online information, I now get to work in an industry that is both challenging and rewarding. I want the ability to enable others to do the same. This blog will serve as a platform for me to contribute to the incredible learning community that surrounds the fields of web development and design.
2. Learning New Skills
I like to keep a big list of things that I want to learn more about, such as new tools, skills, or concepts. That list seems to be getting larger by the day, I love it. Another great aspect about working in the tech industry is that everything is constantly evolving. It can even feel overwhelming at times.
I believe that by reformatting a lot of my notes and discoveries into blog posts, it can help me retain much of the knowledge that I have gained regarding the subjects on my list. Not only will I have to understand something well enough to use it and apply it to my everyday projects, but I will also need to understand it enough to explain it to someone else. This coincides heavily with my favorite learning technique, which I will cover in a later blog entry.
I also believe strongly in the idea of “learning in public”. There’s a lot of great movements out there like 100DaysofCode, CodeNewbie, and the DailyUI challenge that prompts participants to share what they are currently learning and building. I have seen it act as a conduit to some awesome discussions where people learn a lot from each other. In that regard, I want this blog to be another way for me to publicly express what I am learning and hopefully have some great discussions surrounding it.
3. Self Discovery
Another item on my big list of things to learn about is myself. I believe that a blog is a great tool to conduct some introspection. It may even push me outside of my comfort zone, which is another opportunity to learn new things. I know that the more that I learn about myself, I can better understand what I am capable of and what I can accomplish.
I’m not trying to get too deep right now, and I promise that’s not really my overall intention. I’m not putting myself out there to “find myself”. I’ve done quite a bit of introspection these past few years that allowed me to discover who I am and what I love doing. You can learn more who I am and what my values are on my personal page.
Even though I’ve already discovered who I am, I don’t think that self discovery needs to stop there. When I was in school, I really enjoyed the classes where I was either on the computer or drawing something. Creative writing was never really a core strength of mine. I think that sitting down and blogging a few times a month is a great way for me to reflect on various topics and how it applies to myself.
4. Tracking My Progress
As a kid, I loved to draw. Being your typical 90’s kid, I was way into Jurassic Park and Star Wars, so naturally I was drawing page after page of dinosaurs and X-Wings. A few years ago when my mom moved out of her house, I found a box of a bunch of my old drawings. It was so funny to look back and see how my drawing skills had improved over the years. Maybe you had a personal project at one time, that you kept hidden away in a box in the attic or under your bed. You rediscover it years later, and stand back and appreciate just how far you’ve come since then.
I am hoping that this blog will offer me the chance to track my own progress as time goes by. Maybe down the road I will come across a blog post that I wrote, perhaps even this one. I can reflect on what my life and skill-level was like at that time, and acknowledge the progress that I have made since that moment. Maybe an opinion or two would have changed since then.
5. Expanding My Audience
The obvious, somewhat self-serving reason why most people start blogs is to expand their reach and increase site traffic. Just hear me out. One of my favorite aspects of the tech industry is the community that surrounds it. There’s meetups, conferences, slack channels, you name it. I have met, either online or in-person, some really cool, like-minded people involved in the tech scene.
I’d like to connect with even more people, and if this blog provides me with a way to make that happen, i’m all for it. Whether you are into UI/UX design, front-end web development, back-end web development, information security, product management, junior, senior, whatever your focus area or skill level, I believe that there is a way in which we can all grow together.
Much like the tech industry itself, I really want this blog to be community-driven. At the time of writing this post, comments are not available, but I’m looking into ways to implement that feature. In the meantime, feel free to give me a shout on social media. I’m usually active on Twitter or LinkedIn
Recap
Alright, you’ve stuck it out this long, and for that I commend you. See? That wasn’t so bad. Let’s take a brief moment to reflect on what I just covered. Here’s the 5 reasons, in a nutshell, as to why i’ve started on this blogging journey:
1. Knowledge Sharing
2. Learning New Skills
3. Self Discovery
4. Tracking My Progress
5. Expanding My Audience
That’s all for now, thanks again for reading. I’m so excited to get this thing going. I have some more content in the works, so until then, please share this post with your friends, co-workers, distant relatives, whomever. Maybe just giving me a follow on social-media is more your style, that’s cool too. This is Jack Gannon blogging off, until next time!