So you might be asking yourself: “Why am I here? Haven’t I already seen dozens of other tech blogs? Why should I invest my time into reading this one?”

These are good questions and ones that made me hesitate a long time before starting a blog. In the end it really came down to, what do I have to offer that those other tech blogs don’t? My answer to that is, I don’t know. That may not sound like the best answer when I am trying to convince you to stick around, but it is the truth. I am going to write about topics that I find interesting and challenging. I will be bringing my own personal experiences and perspective to everything I write about. So even if you have read a similar article, hopefully, I will be able to bring a new perspective to it and leave you with something new to think about.

So what finally made me decide to stop hesitating and get this blog up and running? There were a number of factors. First, one of my mentors, Mike Weaver, has started blogging a lot more recently and was telling me about how much he has enjoyed it and how much it has promoted his “personal brand”. These sounded like good reasons to blog to me, particularly because, believe it or not, writing papers is one of the biggest things I miss from school and it will be nice to get back to it. My second big reason for starting this now is an impending overload of topics that I would like to talk about. Like I said, I have been bouncing the idea of starting a blog around for awhile and I have gotten to the point that there are so many things I would like to write about that I am going to start losing track of them. All in all, now just felt like the right time to get to this. I am looking forward to writing about all the interesting topics bouncing around my head and I hope you enjoy reading them.

Here is a list of some of the topics you might see me talk about:

• How my experience acting as a mentor to junior developers has shaped me
• Some of the struggles and learnings I have had working with and upgrading legacy code while adding new functionality
• How do you go about choosing the right database
• ReactJS vs AngularJS
• How to write functional JavaScript
• How to write good tests for a web front-end
• My experiences with LaunchCode and how I see it helping to shape the tech community in Saint Louis

If any of these topics sound particularly interesting to you, you have other ideas you think I should write about, or your have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me or reach out on LinkedIn.