The IT Skeptic's 12th birthday

It is the 12th anniversary of the beginning of the IT Skeptic persona and blog. Each anniversary I pause to reflect on the blog and on my own life.

At this point I feel at the top of my game workwise, and my personal life is as near to perfect as it will ever be. This is good for the blog in that I feel I am creating content of good value to you, dear readers, but it is also bad for the blog because it takes away my angry edge and my OCD writing output. As many of you know I fought depression for most of my life and defeated it a few years ago. I want this to be an inspiration to any of you with the same battle. But every mental illness brings benefits as well as difficulties, and certainly my mellowing has taken away an element which drew people to this blog in the first place. This is less of an issue in 2018 because hardly anyone reads blogs regularly anymore. My social media presence is of more importance than my blog for building following these days, and this blog serves primarily as a repository of my ideas.

Certainly my social media output remains angry and acerbic because I choose to comment about personal and public issues as well as work, and I can assure you that some of the things I see in the world today make me pretty angry. Nevertheless the 10th anniversary blog post was about optimism, and and in my heart I remain passionately optimistic about our industry, our society, and our world. I hope you will too: the world needs a lot less cynicism and gothic teenage gloom, and more optimism about our excellent future ahead.

It genuinely saddens me that so many sentient humans over so many thousand millennia have not enjoyed what we enjoy today.
What an amazing world we live in and how much more amazing it will be. I want to live for centuries.

— Rob England (@theitskeptic) May 13, 2018

Thank-you for following. It doesn't mean a thing without you.

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For the tens of you who want an update on my life, read on:

My life went to a new undreamed-of level with the arrival in it of the lovely DrVu, who is now my partner in work and life.

Together we are Teal Unicorn,

providing consulting by the hour: strategy, evangelism, coaching, and training for clients in Wellington and Hanoi.

We also deliver training for the DevOps Institute and games for GamingWorks.

We are also building our own simulation coaching tool, which is getting rave reviews in beta test.

We go everywhere together, so we hope to see you at upcoming conferences