“If you don’t talk about your ideas, they might as well not exist.”

This phrase returns zero google hits for some reason, but the sentiment is not new, and I’m sure someone else has said it better.

I’ve been making things for over a decade, and along the way I’ve accumulated quite a collection of projects and ideas. Some people are good at writing about what they do, others are good at talking about what they do. However, like many makers, I’m mostly just good at making things. Or rather, trying to make things. I’m not very good at writing about them.

Hey You, Look Up. Hey You, Look Up.

I gave a lecture once on surface mount soldering. I’ve answered a few questions about brass goggles over email. I don’t mind talking about technology with people in person, but I’ve never really written about my projects. I’ve never really sent them out into world to live a life of there own. At the very most, there are nice portraits of them on flickr, but that’s about it.

Recently, I quit my job of nine years at a Silicon Valley based fruit company to pursue my own ideas and try and make my own mark on the world. Without a marketing department to talk about my work for me, I’m left to explore how to do that for myself. It’s a meta-skill I never really acquired, and now is the time to try.

It’s the “trying” that’s the interesting part. Often, at the end of a project, I look back and think to myself, “If I’d have known how hard that was going to be, I would never have started.” Usually, at the end of these adventures I look back, and I’m glad I went ahead anyway. There are the surprising discoveries, the setbacks and failures, the obstacles overcome, and the final results. The lessons learned are the interesting part.

This project, my blog, it’s something I haven’t really done before. I stopped playing with web technologies in ‘99, and the state-of-the-art has moved on a lot since then. It’s nicer now, you don’t have to roll everything from scratch, but at the same time, there’s a lot of catching up to do, and lot of exciting new mistakes to make, and with that sentiment in mind…

Here we go!