Mon 10 May 2010
Time for a revival
Alright, so while it's taken me a nine hour long sprint of coding and design, I've finally revived Veno. This is pretty significant, at least on a personal level - the last time I had a personal site and portfolio online was around the beginning of 2007. Several people have asked me why this took so long, though, and so I figured I'd take a moment to jot down my thoughts on the matter.
Full time jobs take... well, time
See, the biggest draw on my time over the past 3 years has been my day job with Webs.com. I wanted to take the time to really dig in and better my skills in this craft, and there's really been no better opportunity presented to me since. It's been grueling at points (week long coding sessions without sleep to push a redesign out the door, anyone?), but well worth it.
Now, after three years, I've found that I missed having a personal platform to do... well, anything I wanted to, in terms of the internet. This led to a six month period of trashed redesign attempts for Veno; after enough failed designs, I decided to just power through it in a day, and this is the result. It's heavily CSS3-based, but should fall back gracefully in just about every browser. I foresee myself refining it over time, though - there's certain things I'm unhappy with, such as the overall "tightness" of the layout. Expect to see it open up and breathe a bit more over the next few weeks, as well as become more personalized.
The other drain... wait, Twitter?
Ah, the micro-blogging phenomenon known as Twitter. For a pretty long while, Twitter dominated most of my "soapbox" needs. I could throw out a small note about whatever I'm feeling, and it would instantly hit an incredibly connected and thriving community. I've probably met and interfaced with more developers and designers over Twitter than anywhere else!
Of course, Twitter is limited to 140 characters. What if I wanna throw up a Javascript or Python tutorial? That certainly can't be done over Twitter (at least, not without annoying the hell out of everyone). By re-igniting Veno, I can provide some much needed separation to my "web 2.0 social aspects", so to speak. Expect this space to be occupied by deeper thoughts and more intricate material, whereas my Twitter feed will remain filled with smaller pieces (updates to my open source projects, etc).
So there it is, all laid out. It's taken a few years, but I firmly believe that this is a case of "good things come to those who wait". It's good to be back - expect to see some awesome things here in the next few months!