About This Site

I registered waylonwalker.com and started making content for it in 2017 after a big industry downturn in 2016 that left me scared for what would happen if I were laid off. The company I was working for at the time did it's first major downsizing in history sending many really good engineers out to look for new opportunities in a world flooded with many in the same situation. This was very similar to what happened to the tech industry in 2024.

This was very similar to what happened to the tech industry in 2024.

See about for more about me.

What is this site?

• It's a blog
• Digital Garden
• Learn in public
• TIL
• portfolio
• my personal corner of the internet

It's NOT Perfect

• There will be mistakes
• I will learn
• Grammar will be fine, but never perfect
• Code will run on my machine, but not guaranteed to be perfect
• There will be days when the whole site is broken

It started as a blog

This site started out as a big B Blog. It was me trying to learn how to write and build content online. This content was to the best of my ability polished and complete. Posts took a long time to make. I liked working on it, but sometimes ideas came faster than I could explore an idea polish the content and publish it.

It's a digital garden

Somewhere along the line I found a really great community of people who create content in ways that they does not require that level of depth and polish on each and every post they make. Ideas flow out and content gets made over time.

Maggie Appleton and the idea of digital gardening has been very inspiriational. She makes really great content with amazing drawings in them. She publishes early and often and labels content with the state that it is in, early and often. Some posts are budding, and some are evergreen. She also distinguishes between notes and essays.

Learn in public

Shawn Wang (swyx) Has been very inpsiring with ideas around Learn In Public .

Whatever your thing is, make the thing you wish you had found when you were learning. Don’t judge your results by “claps” or retweets or stars or upvotes

• just talk to yourself from 3 months ago. I keep an almost-daily dev blog written for no one else but me.

Try your best to be right but don't wait til your the expert to share what you are learning. If something works for you, you are likely mostly right even if you don't have all the right words for it yet. Don't be afraid to be wrong.

TIL

On to one of the most inspirational pieces that I have taken ideas from @jbrancha #til repository . He has been posting daily Tils for Years, and they do pretty damn well on google despite what SEO experts say his results end up in my google search quite often.

I've made many posts on this site in the TIL format. I don't strictly stick to a schedule or a character length quite like Josh Does, but generally they are short, sweet, single ideas.

Thoughts

I created a sub site thoughts to serve as a sort of list of bookmarks, its a place for me to comment, quote, and link to other pages on the internet.

Portfolio

This is my place to create and share content that becomes part of my portfolio. I network with others, share content across social accounts and make it public. This is an example of my work in writing, documenting, mentoring, and web development.

Static Site

This site has gone from html, to gatsby, and finally I built my own static site generator markata . It's been through a few different hosts, but at the end of the day the content is all markdown with frontmatter.

For instance the beginning of this post looks like this.

        
---
date: 2024-05-31 14:07:02
templateKey: blog-post
title: about this site
tags:
  - meta
published: True

---

Own your Content

Throughout this process I have become a proponent of owning your own content on the internet. If you own the domain, the content, and host it yourself you control when it gets published, deleted, and updated. No one can take this away from you execept for you. It's a very powerful tool that I highly recommend everyone to use. You can get your own domain for $12/year or less, and that is all you need to pay.