Welcome to my blog!

Hi, and welcome! After years of incredibly inconsistent blogging, I have now created not only a blog, but a website to host my own blog. This has been a long time coming and I’m really excited about it.

I’ll start by letting you in on a secret. Despite being an engineer, I do actually like writing. I know, I know- I can hear your gasp through my laptop screen. I initially tried to launch my “this is forreal” blog in October 2019 on dev.to. I successfully completed my first post, and was incredibly humbled at how many views it accrued. People found my writing useful; I could hardly ask for more!

However, with that one post, my blogging attempt on that site both started and ended. While 6 or 7 other drafts were started, I never quite completed them. I find dev.to to be a great community, and I really do recommend it to anyone looking to start a technical blog.

So if that’s true, why are we here? I’m glad you asked.

There are a variety of reasons behind why I decided to make my own website. First and foremost, I felt utterly behind in the technical community. Having been part of tech twitter for over a year and completing my second (and likely last) degree were both large parts. Tech twitter can be very convincing in its sometimes subtle, sometimes not so subtle, peer pressure to do cool things. Now, here I am, having succumb to that positive community peer pressure. And having finished my Master’s, I finally had the mental bandwidth to pursue technical hobbies and interests outside of work and school.

There are other reasons as to why this site now exists, though those I have shared are the main factors. Perhaps I’ll share more of my journey through tech in future blog posts, if that’s something people would be interested in.

I believe I’ve now rambled enough through what I hope to be an adequate introduction of myself and my personal website. If you have any requests for content based on what you see and read here, I’m happy to hear them. The best way to contact me is through my twitter, @varcharr.

Thank you for taking the time to read this; I hope you find this blog to provide entertaining, useful, and worthwhile reads!