Hey, Wait...I Thought You Started Blogging in 2012?

It’s true, I did start this blog in October 2012. In June 2018, I made the decision to prune all of my entries before December 2015. I spent a couple of hours reading over the majority of these entries and realized they are no longer relevant to my life and current career trajectory.

When I started this blog, I was just entering into the vast world of network engineering. I was not yet working in an environment that could take advantage of the new skills I was developing. That wouldn’t come until about three years later. Originally, my intention was to have a personal record of my career development and progression. My blog still serves this purpose for me in some ways.

A minor intention in blogging was to attempt to give myself a much-needed boost in self-esteem, especially since I had no peers to communicate these things with for so many years. I felt that by writing content for a community that I was just getting to know, it would serve as a form of self-validation, since I was unable to obtain it from my work at the time.

This is the part that has dramatically changed, especially since I passed the CCIE R&S written exam and made an attempt at the lab exam. Whereas before I would have tried to project personal confidence, but not necessarily feel it within myself, I now feel true confidence in the things I say and do as a professional based both on the skills I’ve developed as well as the professional experience I have established.

I’ve come to this realization within the past month or so, and it occurred to me that this is the point I had hoped to reach someday when I started blogging nearly six years ago. My oldest posts are filled with artificial confidence. My recent posts have a much different feel, and this is what I wish to project publicly moving forward. Out with the old, in with the new, such is the world of technology. :-)