Why Tho?

Why Tho?

Posted on 12/31/2024

Why a blog?

Its new years eve, you're 37, two young kids, a busy life - why start writing a blog?

Who am I?

My name is Jesse Lawrence, a husband, father, and someone perpetually interested in the world around us. I've always told myself I've enjoyed writing, but I've never really done any writing outside of school and university. I write some copy for our family rodeo company (www.primetimerodeo.ca), I do a little bit of technical writing for my day job at Good Lands Environmental, and I write myself a lot of half-baked notes, ideas, and thoughts. My ultimate goal with this blog is to help structure my thoughts into something more cohesive and to build my own personal brand.

I really pride myself on coming up with good ideas, problem solving and being able to take an interest in pretty well anything. The problem I run into is being overloaded with new ideas, and jumping from thought to thought without finishing things. Even worse, I have found myself coming up with the same good ideas years later, and wishing that I would have had the ambition and discipline to follow though with the idea when I originally had it, as its obviously still appealing to me. While I know that I'm not going to follow through on all my ideas, I want this to be a nice way to document what is important to me.

Inspiration

While I've thought about writing for some time now, I would say the inspiration to actually begin something can be traced back to three ideas:

All three of these sources really focus on the importance of being a creator of content, not just a consumer of content. It is about putting stuff out into the world, learning by doing, and leveraging the power of the digital world. Depending on how this blog goes, I believe each of these articles are well worth exploring more in-depth, and are pieces that have been impactful to me.

Snapshot of Today

In the end I am writing these posts for me. I'm attempting to develop my mental muscles, to be more intentional in what I do. Professionally, I find myself working on intellectually challenging GIS, remote sensing and statistical concepts. Personally, its impossible not to be infatuated with AI, and the impact it will have on the world. When I combine those two concepts, I find coding is the most interesting opportunity apply my personal and professional interests. Finally I spend a lot of time on crypto twitter, posting memes and reading about the future of digital property rights and the value of decentralization. Less applicable to my day to day, but the memes and internet culture have been eye-opening. The website this blog will be found on, is just one of the coding projects that I am working on to continue to build my personal brand, and to build in public.

What to expect

I want this blog to be a mix of short and long posts, I want to prioritize consistency, but I also do want to be able to deep dive into niche topics when the opportunity arises. So on that note, I'm going to wrap this up, and attempt to conenct this zenblog headless CMS to my NextJS personal website using CursorAI and Replit. A couple of months ago I didn't know what any of that mean, and now I hope I can use it to my advantage, even if I don't fully understand the ins and outs.

If you read this post, find me on twitter or linkedin - send a message, connect, let me know if you're doing something like this or if you're interested in anything I write about.

Happy New Year to all.

Jesse Lawrence

ps

Obviously my family is a huge part of my life, but I find it harder to share those portions online, especially because my children are young, so I don't intend to share much of my family life online.