Frankly, I love IT, and web development in particular.  I also happen to be exceptionally fortunate to work as an ICT Systems Manager, for a wonderful employer (St Mary’s Shaftesbury) with a great boss (@pearcejim) alongside excellent, appreciative colleagues – the surrounding environment, is also quite heavenly – trust me, it beats working on an industrial estate, just take a look!

Ok, creep points out of the way – this is my angle.

I often work on challenging, mainly in-house, non-public facing projects, which is great.  However, this does mean that a lot of the work I do, is not seen in the same way as a conventional web developer, who may be knocking out websites by the month.  When I do have the opportunity to create websites for a public audience, it’s nice, but this can be infrequent.  Therein, lies the problem.

Web Design/IT - both in terms of technologies and accepted practices & styles evolves at a ridiculously fast pace (helped by Moore’s Law and all that!)

It’s quite strange how you can go from feeling really proud of a website that you have created, to a feeling of near ‘embarrassment’ within a pretty darn short period of time.  It’s fine if you are pushing out a new public portfolio every month, however, if not, then it can present a problem!

Being an avid listener of several major IT focussed, discussion podcasts, I noticed there was a consistent message emanating from then all – talk about what you do.  Not only could this potentially help others, but could also communicate more effectively to clients and colleagues, exactly what you do, how you approach different problems, and your thinking; much better than just having a pretty list of websites.

So, that’s why I decided to “bin the portfolio and blog instead”!