A new adventure

Blogging and social media are both relatively new things to me. Even when I was in college, I was only loosely into Facebook, and I didn’t have my first twitter account until last year. I went through a phase towards the end of school where I (like many young people) thought my thoughts were SO DEEP that I had to get them out there. Luckily, I didn’t go through with it, because I cringe to think of what over-simplistic views of the world I may have espoused on some ill-conceived blog.

It wasn’t until the consulting firm I worked for hired a social media expert that I really started to understand what I could gain by sharing my thoughts with the world. I’d long visited blogs from the Lotus and XPage community either aggregated through Planet Lotus or found through frantic Google searches, but something held me back from contributing. These were the EXPERTS. They had things to offer someone, they had the experience and the knowledge. There wasn’t a place for me in that world.

But then, as I started to think about it, even the greatest expert is always learning. Everyone has something to share, something to teach, a different way of looking at things that someone else may not have considered. Could I offer that? Could I help someone, anyone in the same journey I went through as a young developer? Or even someone more experienced than me, but struggling due to a change in technology or methodology?

I was asked to write some pieces for the blog we were launching at 4CTechnologies, and I decided to focus on tying traditional development to XPages. After my first post was picked up by some aggregate blogs, and gained the attention of some other Lotus and XPages bloggers, I started to want to be a part of that community. I got on Twitter, followed some of the experts, and as I started to interact, I started to feel less like an amateur and more like a peer. Being isolated is a strange feeling, and forcing myself into that isolation with the wealth of social collaboration outlets that exist today was doing nothing but holding me back. As I began to interact with the community, talking about technical issues, tweeting frustrations at times, or even taunting some other XPage developers during the hockey playoffs, I started to feel like a colleague in this community.

The Lotus community isn’t the biggest, but it’s a great community with great people. I wanted to start this blog to branch out a bit more. Share some of my tips, some of my discoveries. Continue my introductory series in the hopes that it helps someone starting out.

And, just maybe, share some of those deep thoughts with everyone. Because, no matter how old we get, no matter what we do, there’s still a little bit of that college philosopher within us.

So, this is a new adventure. I don’t know where it’s going, but I’m interested to find out.