Happy Birthday, Code and Tacos!

Note: The following post was for a previous iteration of this blog, called Code and Tacos. That version of the blog is dead, but I'm keeping this post up for posterity's sake.

End of the Beginning?

I just want to take a quick moment to recognize this little blog’s first birthday!

I had a simple vision when I launched this thing -- to have a space to track my growth in cooking and coding, two areas of my life I’ve taken a focused interest in developing over the last three years. The original concept was to do 20 blog posts - 10 about coding and 10 about tacos. I’d pair a coding lesson with a taco recipe, hence the name Code and Tacos. It’s dumb, and the original concept turned out to not be scalable at all. What if I just wanted to write about code without having the pressure of also preparing a taco recipe? What if I wanted to do a recipe that wasn’t a damn taco? It also has taken me forever to commit to a layout or design. I’m still struggling with that.

It’s also been a big struggle to post regularly. Until recently I’ve been the sole web developer at KLRU, the PBS station in Austin. It’s a rewarding position to be in, but it’s also really demanding. It’s really difficult to spend your days coding, then come home and spend more time coding. We recently hired a second web developer, and now my bandwidth isn’t as stretched. As such I’ve finally been able to start focusing more on running my blog.

Either way, by today I’ve completed the original vision. I have at least 10 coding blog posts, and just the other day I posted my 10th taco recipe. I also think I’ve finally gotten to a good place where I have a plan and capability to grow this blog into whatever I want it to be.

So what does the future hold? I’m working through my first series of coding posts -- breaking down a bunch of JavaScript array methods. I recently spoke at PBS TechCon, so I need to post those slides. I’ll be attending DinosaurJS Conf in Denver next month. I have a Twitter handle that I haven’t used at all. I need to write a readme for this blog and make the GitHub repo public. I have some awesome non-taco recipes I need to memorialize. So there’s a ton of stuff to get through, and I’m so excited to put it out there. And finally the blog itself is getting to a point that I’m proud of visually. But it’s always a work in progress.

At any rate, if you’re reading this, I’m so happy you’re here and I hope that you stick around. There’s so much left for me to learn!