It’s been some time… a little more than 10 years since I’ve updated anything on this domain let alone written anything web-related.
The 10 years have gone by quickly and what I’ve failed to do was keep my online presence active and in a healthy state. This domain would be attacked with the occasional DDOS or attempted XSS injections which would be mitigated and cleaned up but not much more. Any social media is rather frozen in time with the exception of video stories here and there for a quick “real-time” highlight.
I have been able to do a few things…
From a work perspective, I’ve been working in product and technology to scale a business that has a focus on direct response marketing and financial publishing. My focus is Digital Product Strategy and Management I’ve led a department and a very talented team to bring innovation to the immediate business and parent company:
- went headless with WordPress as a CMS in 2018
- took the business serverless
- reduced cost and consolidated infrastructure
- react membership site framework
- mobile phone application framework
- WordPress parent theme framework
- 8 web applications
- 7 mobile applications
- 16 publishing WP CMS sites
- 4 marketing WP sites
- millions of emails produced and delivered
- mass CRM migration into Salesforce
- custom trigger and action application
- customer self-service portal (product research and design)
- 12 rebrands
- 4 company mergers
- 10 new businesses
- affiliate network seed
- video streaming process and integration (live and replay)
- marketing production and development (team and process)
- editorial production and development (team and process)
- and more…
The above are a few immediate business items that some may relate to but they are probably more of the business, technical, and development items I’ve played a part in. My involvement across marketing and editorial publishing has its own touchpoints and bullet lists.
Our parent company and the other businesses within the umbrella have benefited from us setting the pace. Our parent company, MarketWise, even went public on NASDAQ via a SPAC a few years ago.
Regardless of the above technical and innovative accomplishments as well as the improvements across marketing and editorial departments, the business has been going through several years of restructuring with another round of changes coming up. Earlier in the year a massive issue presented itself for the entire business. In the coming weeks, myself and my team will see ourselves leaving the business due to the continued market struggles of the parent company, MarketWise.
The good, the bad and the ugly
Life isn’t all work though.
The best part of the last 10 years has been watching my kids grow into young adults. The adventures we’ve had are what I consider to be the most valuable moments of my life. Their accomplishments are to be celebrated. They’ve tested my patience, they’ve tested me in many ways (good and bad), and they 100% have helped me grow. The challenges, and “hard work” were usually outside of the office but were well worth it.
I’ve had the pleasure of doing a little bit of travel… Ireland to celebrate a friend, visit Puerto Rico as the pandemic softened, explore Costa Rica with friends, visit the The Exumas (gorgeous views) with the kids, England and Italy with my Son, and many trips across the US to various States and Cities. However, the trips that were paused in 2020 still need to be rescheduled.
Speaking of the pandemic… during this time my kids asked “Have you ever done this (quarantine, stay isolated) before?” where I had to respond that not only was this something I’ve never experienced in my lifetime but that most of us were going through it together as a first including our family, friends and a majority of the World.
I’ve experienced loss. The loss of close family members, friends, and loved ones. While never easy, it was another first when immediate family members left us.
Moving forward.
I’m actively updating this space and I hope to spend more time with all of you and share some thoughts here and there.
AI has been a very hot topic in recent years. From large language models (LLM) to some of the most impressive examples of generative AI across mediums such as text, images, video, and audio. Every week the models for your known and unknown platforms are being updated at an accelerated rate.
I spun up an updated WP instance to reset and migrate this domain and previous WP content only to find that there is controversy across WP trademarks and open-source rights and the community is finding themselves on different sides. The first to react are the contributors, developers, and businesses directly associated with WordPress but it will soon affect the normal user.
Why did I decide to use WordPress again… I’ve been in the ecosystem since around 2005 and aside from having a large and growing market share they have been making great progress with their visual block editor, which I am forcing myself to use to learn its quirks compared to how I’ve previously used WP. Most recently I’ve used WP as an editor for a custom headless CMS setup with a custom schema and related custom APIs but I’d like to test out the available GraphQL options for a Gatsby setup or a NextJS setup.
Headless CMS, composable CMS, detached CMS… a lot of terms but all relate to publishing and managing content. A lot of players in the field of content management and I have an interest in how these products will evolve.
Web3, crypto, and blockchains. This is what brought me back to X a few years ago. Let’s just say I’ve been active in the space but have purposely kept it segmented from personal and work for a few reasons but I may start merging the accounts and personas. While working in product and technology to scale a business that has a focus on financial publishing I made the choice to not talk about any financial-related thoughts and or ideas in any public forum. This may also change before the end of the year… if not sooner.
What’s Next
So… in an effort to keep things up to date:
- I have moved all previous content to a temporary backup WP site
- I need to clean up all previous content to import back into the main domain as all backlinks will be broken (for now temp redirects for the high-traffic pages)
In process or coming soon:
- Use WP to force myself to use and learn the block editor
- Offload images from the server and move them to S3 (limiting uploads till then)
- Clean up social profiles
- Review schema
- Rank higher on keywords across digital strategy, product and even my own name
- I need to start sharing my thoughts and findings around the block editor
- Test out WP GraphQL
- Share my experiences with going headless and serverless in a business environment
- Share some thoughts on my overall product and technology experience
- Share insight into Crypto Twitter (X) or at least self-custody and decentralized networks
- …
I have a lot of catching up to do. While I don’t know what’s next, whether it’s a leadership role, a marginal role, or starting an entity I do know that you have to enjoy what you’re doing. More on this soon.
If you didn’t know, the title of this post is a reference to the lyrics below which is the intro and outro to Aaliyah’s Try Again. The song is technically about relationship advice but the chorus, beat, and performance by Aaliyah and Timbaland are what make this a great song.
It’s been a long time…
We shouldn’t have left you…
Without a dope beat to step to…
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