In a word, my outlet, though, I hope for it to be so much more. I’m hoping it’s a place for me to share the knowledge I’ve accumulated working in tech, a place to put my thoughts in a constructive (or destructive at times, too) way, and perhaps make the world a better place. Before writing this, I’ve spent hours reading and preparing what you should do when starting a blog. The marketing experts say you should tailor every post to one goal–one call to action, the tech experts say you should build something valuable first, and the spiritually savvy say there are no rules. I’ve decided to make this authentic and write what feels genuine.
My passions do not seem to lend themselves to another, but I plan to cover all of them: finance, technology, and maintaining a fit lifestyle. Over the years, I’ve taught myself to invest. At first, my imposter syndrome kept me from telling anyone about my success. I mean, I have zero training in the field, nor do I have a career in finance or any real reason you should listen to what I have to say. Even yet, I’m not a financial advisor, so expect all the usual disclaimers. 😉
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always been interested in engineering, technology, and physics. As a child, I built computers to play Age of Empires II with my friends; I still remember fumbling around the networking configurations on our $40 Netgear router to set up a LAN party. I didn’t know what I was doing, but as I learned the fundamentals in college, it definitely helped that I had seen a subnet mask before. Now I’m an IT Director at VCA Canada, leading a team of IT professionals, software engineers, and DevOps engineers. At VCA Canada, we’re really pushing DevOps practices into the traditional IT space instead of software teams shipping code into production.
When I graduated high school, I was immediately focused on making money as quickly as I could. I wanted to be successful, and my naive mind thought money was how you’d get there. I wanted to maximize every dollar I hustled for, so I showed up to finance events in the evenings and asked all these financial advisors what I should do. They’d recommend books, and I’d go read them. Eventually, I started to understand the basics of finance. This lead to me slowly investing my retirement money on my own instead of a savings account, mutual funds, or even EFTs. At first, it was just a portion of my retirement, but I’ve slowly added more and more. Now almost 75% of my retirement funds are managed by me instead of a “professional.” I have no intention of making money off my posts relating to finances. I have a few apps I want to make, but that will have to wait.
So that’s it–a summary of what you can expect here. If you’d like to be notified when I put out new content, drop me your email and let me know which of these three topics interest you. I’ll never spam you.