My First Online Space
August 26th 2018 by Mads Rasmussen - 4 min. read
I have never had a real personal space online, even though I have been building websites and digital experiences for many years. In my professional life, I am working with the wonderful people at Umbraco. I work as a UX-engineer in the core CMS team. Through my career, I have moved from designing websites towards frontend development, and I now find myself in a wonderful place between the two. Today I have the opportunity to work creatively with user experiences and get my hands dirty with coding as well.
Umbraco is an open-source CMS and has a community like no other. There is always someone willing to give feedback or help out with coding problems. You might think that working on a CMS every day should be plenty of reasons to already have a website, but with a combination of me thinking "I don't have anything worth sharing" and being stuck in the "most difficult project you can build" - something for yourself. It just never happened.
A book changed it all
I recently read the book "Show Your Work!" by Austin Kleon and it really lightened a fire in me. It gave me the urge to get that personal space online. The book got me away from thinking that my website has to be a polished portfolio with finished projects but instead could be a living space with ideas, thoughts, and work in progress. It should be a place where I will be able to learn new things and share my progress along the way. A place for me to give a little back to all the people who have consciously or unconsciously helped me one way or another.
“The best way to get started on the path of sharing your work is to think about what you want to learn and make a commitment to learning it in front of others.”
- Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!
This new perspective removed my fear of my website and it made me realize how much quality you can find in an idea and in a learning process.
What can you expect from this space?
I don't know yet and I think that is the wonderful thing right now. No big plans, nothing else than a need to have a space to share ideas when I want. What I do know is things will change, move around, be added and might be removed again.
Now the first step is taken. I have my space, where I can share my learnings. At Umbraco, we recently released a beta version of Umbraco Headless (A Headless CMS) and I have built this website to test it out and learn a little Vue.js and Nuxt.js in the process. I think there might be a post right there.
“Give what you have. To someone, it may be better than you dare to think.”
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!)
If you think this could be the slightest interesting I hope you will follow along. Please share your questions and ideas if you have any. The easiest place to find me is Twitter.
I am happy to see you here and I hope we meet again.
“Having your work out in the world is a free education that goes on for a lifetime.”
- Christopher Hitchens (Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!)