Time for a sunrise

March 11th, 2019 Life 'silhouette of trees at golden hour' by Jaime Serrano on Unsplash

After years of no blogging, it's time to start writing again. I've had two previous periods of blogging. Looking back at those periods a lot has changed, again.

From 2003 till 2006 I wrote my blogposts in Dutch. Those blogposts are lost in history, I can't recall the topics I wrote about. This doesn't matter, there was no evergreen content in there anyway.

On the 1st of July 2007 I restarted blogging, this time it was on mark.mymonster.nl. I wrote about Life and Technology, but mostly it was just development related blogposts. After 2013 my writing became irregular, with only a small number of posts in 2014 and 2015. And then there was silence, a lot of silence.

I'm seeing this silence as a long night. But the sun is rising. I'm back!

Family growth

When I restarted blogging in 2007, I was just about to get married. During the coming years our family would grow from my wife and I to include three beautiful daughters.

These days my girls are doing great! They are now aged 10, 8 and 5 years old, and growing up really fast. My oldest daughter is going to secondary next year with her year-and-a-half younger sister following soon after that. My youngest daughter is taking swimming lessons while her bigger sisters play hockey.

My wife started working again about a year-and-half ago after being home for our girls for over 4 years. She is doing great, working as a teacher for children with multiple handicaps. I'm really proud of the work she is doing for those children.

Technology pivoting

A lot of technology has come since I restarted blogging in 2007. Things like Silverlight, Windows Phone, Windows 8, all gone now. Actually it was my interest in Silverlight and Windows Phone that kept me going on the blog for quite some time. Microsoft even recognized me by awarding the precious Microsoft MPV Award. Those were very interesting days, besides having tight contact with Microsoft I really loved the community around Silverlight and Windows Phone. Still miss those days.

Even though things come and go, .NET has been a steady one in my career. These days it's mostly .NET Core and Azure. This combined with new architecture patterns like Micro Services gives me energy to start blogging about my experiences with .NET Core and Azure.

Career pivoting

In late 2015 the company I was working for went for bankruptcy. This had some impact on my life. Sometimes you need some forces from outside to push you into the right direction. For me this direction was to start freelancing fulltime. Even though I am working onsite for my customers, things are quite different. For a starters I needed to build a network to find customers who wanted to hire me. Next I needed to make sure I got my finances right. Making sure I could pay the mortgage and the income tax while feeding my family.

This is working out great so far. But now I am thinking about how I can adjust my business to earn passive income next to working by the hour which I still love to do. I want to share my explorations on this path to a changed freedom.

Rise and shine

Enough about what happened and the plans. Let's start to execute them!