The number 10 is cropping up a lot. There’s Donncha’s brief post about being Automattic’s first employee to hit the 10 year mark alongside the company, and Matt’s Ten Years of Automattic recounting the journey from 1 to almost 400 employees.1
And, while this year will also be my 10th year blogging2, I’ll also be celebrating 10 years of marriage to my wife and best friend Jaclyn this Saturday. We’re a little beat up right now,3 but really looking forward to our first nights away from our son, who will be six months old the day after our anniversary.
A lot has changed in 10 years. This blog used to be updated regularly, primarily about trying to understand my faith as a Christian. Now I don’t write much—I used to—and my faith journey has become a more complex affair and no longer a writing subject. One of the reasons my writing has become infrequent is probably because I’ve never quite found that central topic I once had.
But I do have things to say. More importantly, writing is how I find out what I think. I’ve been squashing the “I should write about that” impulse, and I don’t think it’s been good for me. And there’s a lesson here from both 10 year milestones: you find out where you’re going by setting out. Just begin, you’ll never imagine where you’ll wind up.
- I joined the party a little over three years ago as somewhere around employee #115. This is the longest I’ve worked anywhere in my life. ↩
- Starting on Blogger, natch. WordPress.com was still invite-only at the time, I think, and all my friends were already on Blogger. I moved to WP about a year later and accidentally kick-started a career on the web. ↩
- I fell off my then under-construction deck, twisted my knee, and fractured my tibia. Two days later, my wife was in a bicycle collision, fractured some facial bones, and needed some minor reconstructive surgery. Let’s just say that I’m putting Automattic’s unlimited vacation policy to good use right now. ↩
One response to “Ten”
@mattwiebe nice read. Check you colophon page. Some plugin errors.