I get the feeling I should be treating this as a first post, it being almost 4 years since I last updated this blog. A friend of mine informs me (indirectly, admittedly!) that the first post in a blog is invariably rubbish. It looks like I'm sticking to that mantra.
So, new first post in this blog: a chance to introduce myself (again) and say a bit about why I created this blog.
When I was primarily tech support/a programmer, I had the rare gift to communicate with users in simple terms, without patronising them or hand-waving problems away. I noticed that many other techs had difficulty with this, and surprisingly so does the technology press, although to a lesser extent. So this blog was meant to be a place where I discussed currently popular themes in technology, in layman's terms, but with sufficient content to be useful.
My gifts, I'm pleased to say, haven't gone unnoticed, and since I last posted in this blog I've moved out of web development. While my current job title is officially "Database Manager", a fairly large part of my responsibility falls within User Engagement, a field that's so nebulous it includes Sales/Marketing, Business Analysis (even I'm not immune from jargon), Support, Market Research, and other functions I struggled to put a name to even when "User Engagement" was actually part of my job title (I work on fixed term contracts so move jobs semi-regularly!). In that sense the title of this blog became self-fulfilling, of course: I have moved from Tech to User in my focus.
So, does that change the focus of this blog? Well, probably not. I'll be spending a lot more of my working time dealing directly with users, so this blog has become far more relevant to my day job than in the previous 4 years. It's a good time for me to start blogging again, so we'll see how it goes.
If there are any technical issues you'd be interested in my opinion on, or you want to know more about what I do or where I do it, feel free to drop a comment in here, and I'll answer as many questions as I can.
