First Blog

My name is John Griffin, and I've been an IT consultant since the mid-80s. I've been working as an independent consultant since 2017, and since going independent, it has felt strange not to have a website.

But it was not obvious what I would do with a website. Part of my motivation for leaving the comfort of a larger organization was to get back to more "hands on" work, and to publish a book and/or articles sharing experiences, thoughts, and ideas with others.

So, today I thought I'd explore my options for setting up my website (I reserved the domain when I registered my LLC). The best-fit option was to start a blog. Fortunately, I've compiled a decent collection of topics for discussion. Unfortunately, I have not given much thought to organization or presentation yet. That is why you are reading a relatively boring blog post entitled "First Blog" - hopefully I get more creative as I learn how the Blogger platform works with the Google Domains' website builder logic.

This is a typical model for how I operate, which hopefully will come through in future posts. I get these ideas and noodle on them for a long time before eventually starting to try them out in some form or another in order to flesh them out more fully. The main point to this is to learn along the way. I find it difficult to learn along the way if I don't have an initial, albeit partial, vision of what I want to accomplish. But once the "noodling" has progressed sufficiently, then it is time to experiment and learn how the stuff works - whatever that stuff is.

My future topics all come from my experience and the generosity of others sharing their knowledge. I hope to return the favor. As part of my commitment to keep all private and confidential information secure and removed from the discussions. In some cases, this will make the examples a bit complicated to read - I hope not, but this is something I've encountered in my initial note-taking and brainstorming sessions. Real-world examples make for some of the best reading, in my opinion. The goal is to share abstracted versions of real-world situations that are illustrative while preserving confidentiality.

So, let's see how this works, and how it looks, and how it reads. I hope you enjoy the blog as it evolves.