Happy New Year! This blog has managed to do what most blogs do and languished with no activity for a couple of years now, even though it has kind of been in the back of my mind that I really should do something with it.

Those that know me will know that I don’t really believe in New Year’s resolutions. I typically don’t really believe in arbitrary date boundaries to make changes to my life if I start to realise a change is needed. And famously, New Year’s resolutions don’t tend to stick for people. So I’m not treating this as a resolution, but rather a new thing I’d like to try and concentrate on a bit more from this point forward. The coincidence that it happens to be a thing I’m doing at the beginning of a new year (and a new decade!) is just that.

Over the holidays, I’ve had some more free time to think a little bit about where I am in my life. I’ve come to a few realisations:

I’ve spent a lot of my spare time over the last few years playing Hearthstone. I really got into it for some of that time and had some success with it. But if I’m honest, I’ve started to lose interest in it and it doesn’t capture my attention like it used to. It’s an easy game to get trapped in though and for the past few months I’ve been coasting along playing it most days but not feeling engaged. I think it’s time to uninstall and move on.
I’ve realised that I haven’t been able to put a name to what I find interesting about computing. There’s a lot of things I do find interesting, but what’s my passion? Something I’ve come to realise is that I find the architecture of servers pretty fascinating. I’ve had the benefit of working on two different highly successful poker server platforms. These architectures are fascinatingly different-but-same. I want to explore those differences and get a better picture of what’s out there for competing technologies. It’s something I have more than a decade of experience in, and I’d like to better be able to discuss that experience and share things I’ve learned.

So, where does that bring me? I have a couple of goals for the coming months. I intend on spending more of my free time on learning about server architectures. One way to track this progress is to write about what I’ve learned, and that has the benefit of reviving this blog again and giving me a way to look back on what I’ve learned over time.

If this sticks and I get in the habit of writing more, then I might expand a bit on the kinds of content that I write for this blog. I have several ideas on some things I can do for content, but let’s start slow and steady and see where it take us.