Hello! My name is Dana and I'm a software engineer. I used to have a blog in the before times, but I abandoned it because things got a bit hairy there in those pandemic years. I only ever wrote a couple of posts, but I enjoyed it when I did so I am keen to try again and have been planning to for literally years now.

As engineers, we love solutionising and I've found myself doing that with this blog. I thought to myself "well, I can't possibly use a pre-made blogging platform, I will need to build something myself!" So I tried creating a new, hand-rolled version of my blog, first in Next.js, then in Jekyll and then in Eleventy. None of them got anywhere.

It's a lesson that I clearly still haven't quite taken on - it's not the tooling that's important, it's the final result. So I've decided to try using Hashnode for a bit, to at least get me started. Then, if I still enjoy blogging and find that I need something a bit more custom, I can always hand-roll my stack.

For now, I've adopted the name of my old blog, which was {dev}adventures, but I am looking to shift focus a bit. Back then, I aimed to share technical lessons I'd learned and the blog focused largely on sharing knowledge on front-end frameworks or tools. These days, I want to share my experiences as a Staff+ Engineer and I may write more about soft skills, though I'm sure I will still ponder on the tech stuff too because those problems still interest me.

I haven't decided what the new name of the blog will be just yet, but in the interests of just getting something out there, I will leave it as it is for now and as soon as I've thought of a name that suits this project better, I'll let you know.

Perhaps not the most interesting post, but it's a start. If you've read this far, I want to say thanks and I promise to post something a bit more exciting soon!