Welcome to my blog, a space I've been imagining for some time now, and to which I've finally decided to give life. But first, let me explain to you how the process of making this decision has been and what goals I have with this project.

If you are curious about the architecture and technology used to build the blog checkout my second article.

Why starting a blog?

It all started a few months ago. After four intense years, I completed my university studies in telecommunications engineering. Upon graduation, I began working full-time at the company where I had already been working for a few months, developing the project that was my thesis project. It was then that I started working on a project aimed at improving cloud cost management. The thing was, I didn't have much of an idea about managing such costs (FinOps) or many of the cloud services that the company frequently used.

That's why I started taking several courses and reading the documentation of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMWare vSphere. For those of you who work in the cloud, these names will probably sound familiar. When I realized that I would later need to be able to explain these concepts to my mentor and eventually convey optimization opportunities to my superior, I decided to start documenting everything. I created a page in the documentation tool we use (Atlassian's Confluence) and began to generate a sort of Wiki around the different services I was investigating, how they charge you, etc.

In doing so, I realized that documenting is a very valuable tool for learning. By writing down and organizing what I considered important, it forced me to ensure that I understood the details of what I read. Additionally, I noticed that this process increased the amount of information I remembered later on.

And what does that have to do with this blog, you may wonder? Well, everything. As I've reflected in the "About Me" section of this website, as a highly curious person, I'm always learning things, reading, listening to podcasts, doing mini-projects... All of this gives me a lot of knowledge, and I think having the excuse to write a post on my blog about these topics can help me reinforce them. At the same time, it can also help me build a personal brand.

What Will I Write About?

On one hand, I want to reflect a bit on everything that my resume can't capture, which is my interest in everything beyond technology. I spend all day listening to podcasts and reading, and I want to maximize the learning I get from it through articles on this blog.

On the other hand, I want to document here the experiments I do with new technologies, side projects, and lessons I learn from my day-to-day life as a programmer. It's possible that I may also end up sharing this more technical part on Medium, a widely used blogging platform in the tech world.

Creating a Brand

Initially, I had the idea of titling the blog with my name. After giving it some thought, I realized it was best to give to it some narrative. I titled it "Not Just a Developer" because I consider myself a highly versatile person. It annoys me a bit having to label myself as a "software developer" on my resume and LinkedIn; I am much more than that!

I want to work on projects where I am valued for more than just my technical skills. I have opinions about things, I can conceptualize, and I enjoy solving problems. I am very empathetic, which gives me the ability to put myself in others' shoes, identify pains, and see how to solve them with technology.

Additionally, in this blog I want to show that I am interested in many things, not just technology. That is why "Not Just a Developer" is a perfect fit. The logo features the brand name and color, with a figure of a person, to give it that personal brand feeling. Additionally, it has a pattern of lines representing my analytical skills.

Wrap-up

And that's it for my first post! I hope I haven't bored you too much. Looking back, two months ago when I started learning React (the technology I used to build the blog's UI), I am more than happy with the result. Many things have not come easily, the first versions of the blog were ugly, things were out of place, I wasn't sure how to give personality to the UI... But through trial and error, accepting the chaos and focusing on improving it a little bit each time, I have achieved something that, although it still needs improvement, I think is quite good.

Life is much better when you have challenges and goals to work for every day. I hope this blog serves as an excuse for me to continue finding and pursuing those challenges. I hope it becomes a platform that facilitates my learning, growth, and connection with other like-minded individuals. Thank you for joining me on this adventure, see you in future posts!

Gabriel Fortià, Not Just a Developer.