It’s Ryan’s fault.

Ryan recently asked me if I had a portfolio. He comes from a design background, and that’s a fairly typical thing for a designer to have. I’m not a designer, but he suggested that perhaps there were things I could talk about if I had a place to talk about them.

He meant mostly professional things; we work in the MBTA’s Customer Technology Department, and Ryan is my supervisor. My role is to wrangle CTD’s infrastructure, and I came to it with nearly two decades of experience in IT, systems administration, “devops”, and other related technology stuff.

You should write about that, he said. It’s good to talk about what you do online. Professional development and all that.

I’ve had this domain since 2001, and it’s had a few lives in that time. I was an early child of the Internet, from a time before the Internet started taking over everyone’s lives, and I was always curious how it all worked under the hood. I made my first website at 14 or 15, which has mercifully been lost to time.

In recent years, as social media became a thing and there wasn’t much point in anyone having their own website anymore, this site became a sort of personal link farm, with links to all my various profiles on other platforms. You can still find those at the bottom, just in case.

As an early millennial, I supposed I’ve become a believer in the concept of a “personal brand”, and this site has always been a reflection of that. So when I got to thinking about the idea of having a place to write about my work, it quickly ballooned into an idea about having a place to collect the different pieces of my digital life. Partly to keep myself honest, and partly because it’s fun to make something new every now and then.

So you may find some professional development stuff under the Work category. But you’ll also find stuff about my other hobbies and interests – Projects, Adventures, Photos, and general Thoughts. I’ve been working on backfilling content from other sources, and will add more as I go. It’s kind of nice to have it all in one place.

Because why not?