NaNoWriMo, Jamuary, and a 5K!

So, I don’t do the New Year’s resolutions thing; I never have. Instead, I try to step back every year around my birthday in late summer and take stock of the previous year, and look ahead to what’s going on. This year I made a conscious decision to try to set reasonable monthly goals for myself and see how I did at the end of each month. I’ve been using a modified bullet journal for goal-setting and tracking for the previous year, doing a bit more up-front planning and thinking and reflecting at the beginning of each month. How it went

50% discount on my Packt Publishing Books!

KF6GPE50

Shameless plug — Packt is running a special for the three books I’ve written for them. If you’ve been thinking about Qt Creator or JavaScript Object Notation and haven’t taken the plunge, here’s a reason to do so! Follow one of the links below, and use the code ‘KF6GPE50’ at checkout for your discount!

JavaScript JSON Cookbook

Application Development with Qt Creator, 2nd Edition

Application Development with Qt Creator

The obligatory first post…

Installing and configuring WordPress has been on my personal to-do list for an absurdly long amount of time. Back in February 2002, I started a personal blog on LiveJournal, which I kept up-to-date on an intermittent basis. I’d always planned on using it both as a professional soapbox and a personal journal, although it quickly became more of the latter than the former. In recent years, it’s largely lain fallow, a victim of benign neglect as I tackle professional writing and engineering commitments.

With the imminent publication of my latest book, Beginning Javaâ„¢ ME Platform (Beginning from Novice to Professional), it’s again apparent that I should put more effort into reaching out to both those I know and those who read my work. Not only is this an important part of publicity for me as an author, but it’s also a service to you, my readers, because it gives me an opportunity to keep you up to date. I only hope that I am more successful in keeping you up to date than I am self-publicity, something I have generally neglected. 

Hence, this blog.

I’m not certain what all I will post here, or how frequently I will post. You can certainly expect any updates or feedback on my books, of course, but I’m also planning on using this as a working notebook for other technical musings. I don’t have any plans to become a career blogger and make this a central part of my professional activities; to be frank I think there’s too much of that on the Internet already! Instead, I think this is going to fill a very narrow nice, with me posting the occasional update to a previous (probably paper) publication, various tips and tricks I’ve picked up in my engineering career, and possibly some engineering notes about things I’ve found difficult in the hopes that capturing it here will help others.

Thanks for stopping by!