Welcome

When I was young, my older brothers started playing chess. They tried to teach me, but they lacked the patience and I lacked the attention. I was left out of the matches, but compelled by youngest brotherly instinct to watch over their shoulders. Eventually, my mother took pity on me and tried a different tack to get me in the game.

When I sat down at the family computer and played Fritz & Chesster Learn to Play Chess for the first time, something changed. The learning process was no longer a mountain to climb, but a series of engaging binary steps. It took about a week. Seven days. Culminating in the downfall of my brothers. I won 10 games straight against each of them, and we haven't played a match since. The shame of losing to their youngest brother was more than their egos could bear.

I don't play much chess these days. I have a full-time job, a newborn son, and too many hobbies to manage as it is. But that feeling I had while sitting at a computer and building a skill one step at a time is one that has stuck with me throughout my entire life. It is the feeling of having a difficult goal, then finding a way to accomplish it efficiently, and often pleasantly. It is engaging, it is fulfilling, and it makes for one helluva drug.

In recent years, I've lost touch with this feeling. My days are taken up with work, which, while engaging, does not scratch that oh-so-incessant creative itch. My nights are taken up with family time, which, while more fulfilling than anything else in the world, does not provide the same sense of individual struggle and accomplishment of setting a large goal, and accomplishing it across many measurable iterations.

And so, dear reader, we arrive to the page you are reading now. With scraps of spare time, a web-server, and a will to learn, I built this page. With the same, I will conquer the world. Or, at the very least, I will get a sense of gratification for having done something worthwhile. I do not know how this site will change and evolve, but I have several tenets that will guide its progression:

1. My family is more important than my hobby. More important than anything, in fact. This may mean large gaps of time between deliverables.
2. Curiosity and creative fulfillment are more valuable than money. While this site's journey may tangentially lead to replacing my day job, that, in itself, serves mainly to enhance creative freedom and to strengthen my family ties.
3. Artificial Intelligence is for acceleration, not substitution. All artifacts on this site will be created by me. I will use AI tools to enhance my own learning and understanding, but not to replace my creativity or spare myself any mental burden.
4. If readers find my iterative exploration interesting and informative, excellent. If they don't, fuck em'. I'm building for me. For my own learning and to satisfy my own curiosity.

As for what you will actually find here, I'm not sure myself. Expect narrative explorations of problems I'm working through, project logs and announcements, and artifacts of my successes and failures in software development.

With that, I welcome you to my little corner of cyberspace. Take your shoes off and stay a while. My name is FreesideJockey. I am a software engineer, a dad, and a geek.

Artifacts:

This website was built using the following resources:

• 1 html file
• 1 DigitalOcean Droplet running Ubuntu
• 1 NGINX configuration file
• 1 README.md explaining the process of building and deploying the website

All files are available on Github