Archive for the ‘General’ Category

Hello world. Hello world indeed.

Monday, February 15th, 2010

So this is a brand new website.  My former professional website will shortly be entombed, its singular name released back into the wild, its contents set on fire and nudged out to sea.

Why?

Well, Jim, there are a number of reasons.  My former website was invertible.net.  I thought it was quite clever to snap up that simple, one word domain, even if .com was taken, and I got it essentially because nobody knows how to spell it.  Unfortunately, nobody knows how to spell it, so the memorability of a one word domain name is lost if everybody is looking for invertable.net.  Also, I was tired of being corrected when I was right.  A more argumentative soul may have relished proving people wrong on a common misconception; such pleasures have long been lost on me.

A better reason is I’m changing my professional name to Hunt Welch, Hunt being my middle name.  I’ve considered this for a while, because there’s a congressman named Peter Welch, and as a low-key, problem-solving oriented software engineer who’s not famous for anything, I will never beat him out for that first page of google results.  After the congressman, there are 240 Peter Welch’s on Facebook, so I’m bowing out.  They can have it.  As far as I know, nobody is named Hunt Welch, so I have an edge.  Also, it’s cool.

An even better reason than that is I made my old website by hand years ago, when I knew basically nothing and was teaching myself php with w3schools.  When it breaks and I have to look at the code and fix it, I can’t help but think, “I wouldn’t hire me.  Jesus, who wrote this?”  The effort of resuscitating a code base that’s begging for death became less practical than starting over, and the difficulty in updating the simplest elements is part of the reason the last entry was made three years ago, and the portfolio pieces make me cringe on a regular basis.  The other reason is of course that I’ve been working office jobs non-stop for three years, so my look-for-work website was low on my list of things to do.

Finally, everybody’s looking for WordPress people, so I figured it was about time to install it and start learning it.  I’ve long resisted these kinds of prepackaged CMS systems, because I’m a self-taught programmer.  I didn’t go to school for it, didn’t know what was out there, and it started as a hobby, and in a hobby, you’re not worried about how long it takes.  You want to reinvent the wheel, and call your old math professors with obscure trigonometry problems so you can program a 3D interface that’s already been done by countless people who did it better than you ever will.  I got into this life via curiosity; now that it pays my bills, I need to be more efficient about things.

So.  My name is Hunt.  This is my WordPress blog.  Hello world.