Why does this site exist?

The Beginning

I used to have a blog, GuitarThinker.com, a while ago... It was a Wordpress site, and it was pretty cool. Over time, some pretty interesting and valuable content was created. Posts included guitar lessons, music theory explanations, chord charts, and a few interviews with really interesting musicians, some were actually pretty famous.

Wanting to move towards more ever-more-helpful content, I picked up a book, learned to write a little code, and started building cool Flash games that people could play to practice musical concepts, like how to spell chords, or memorize the notes on the guitar fretboard.

Writing those games in Flash, with ActionScript 3, got me hooked on programming computers. I couldn't get enough. The code bug bit me. But there was a problem, Flash was about to die a horrible death. The iPhone had just come out and Apple had announced the iPhone wouldn't support Flash, and that was the beginning of the end for that platform.

So, I started learning JavaScript. As the new HTML5 specifications promised Flash-like performance and capabilities (this turned out to be false), I forged ahead, rebuilding these games in native web technologies. I was mostly unsuccessful, because it turned out animation, and complex game interactions, in raw CSS and JavaScript was, and still is, not easy. At this time I was also rebuilding many of these games as native iPhone apps, in Objective-C, but that isn't directly related to this story.

Side note: The journey of learning "how to code," and the subsequent career change, totally transformed my life. Software engineering is a very in-demand and lucrative career, compared with most others. I hope to write more on that topic in the future.

The Mistake

So there I was, having rebuilt some flash games with web tech, and feeling pretty good. And then I did the unthinkable. I took down the Wordpress site. I didn't back up the posts, or save them in any way. They were just gone. The gravity of the situation didn't hit me until years later when I realized all the lessons, the interviews, the great content, were gone forever. I had been too focused on the new shiny. Obsessed with the new things I was creating, the older things were discounted and disregarded. I didn't take the time to preserve the good things I had made, because interviews and blog posts didn't fit with the interactive future I had imagined for GuitarThinker.com.

I have rebuilt that site at least four times since then, in jQuery, Angular 1x, Angular 2+, React/Redux, etc. After all, a web professional has to keep up with the latest JavaScript frameworks. The focus has always been on games and interactivity, and there hasn't been a blog component, or any place to share anything that's not specifically music related.

Redemption

So, five years later, here we are. Starting over. Doing some writing, on a site separate from GuitarThinker, and hopefully sharing things that prove useful to others. Planning to write about a wider variety of subjects, rather than strictly music and guitar as in the past, and sharing projects that are in various stages of completion.