Back to the Future

Hi! I’m Michael Warf, and well - I wear a lot of hats.

I’m a University IT Manager in the day, but after hours I invest in family and creative pursuits as much as I can possibly fit into the remaining daylight.

In Lethbridge you’ll catch me around town with my family, filming a vlog, guzzling coffee, staring vacantly at my phone uttering “uh huh, riiight, yeah…of course I’m listening” to someone who actually needs my attention, running a silk-screen press, or deep-diving into new technology tools eager to keep on top of trends.

While that description doesn’t even scratch the surface of who I am, it’ll do for today - and fits where this blog is headed.

Blogging? Um…it’s 2018

Right? Blogging is a pretty 2010 kinda thing to do - gone are the days of people furiously documenting their life online with the hopes of picking up an advertiser or two (with secret hopes of quitting the rat race and blogging from their virtual office in Thailand.)

So why (re)start a blog in 2018?

I have a whole other set of reasons for blogging, and they overlap nicely with why I create and share video content on YouTube.

1. I’m devoted to lifelong learning
2. I love to share what I learn with others

So with that in mind I’ve kickstarted my blog back to life on a new (to me) platform called Ghost, which I host on a server at Digital Ocean. Now those two techy things might not interest you - so I’ll save the details for a future post clearly marked tech, so you can opt in or run away at your leisure.

I recently marked 10 years of service at my day job and it got me thinking about what skills I’d developed, gained or focused on this past decade? It didn’t take me long to realize I had grown comfortable where technology was concerned - sure I had worked hard on people and leadership skills (I lead a development team), but the stuff that really got me interested in digital communications as a career was rusty!

The biggest attraction to working with web technologies is that it constantly changes. Relearning your skills every 6 months isn’t for everyone, but as someone who welcomes new methods & tools, this kind of change is exciting!

While I kept current on the industry news, I’d let the new kids concentrate on the more innovative stuff and it was starting to show. So when we lost our team’s designer at work - I rolled up my sleeves at started to figure it all out again, and it’s a nerd-rush for sure!

So while I geek out over things like Docker, Pattern Lab, Node, Grunt, SASS, Atom , GitHub, Craft, Grav & Ghost I plan to write about the experience here - hoping it’ll reignite a spark in another webby-type person and relaunch a passion or two!

Welcome aboard! I promise it won’t all be tech nonsense - it can’t be - work / life balance just won’t let it, and Summer is almost upon us.

The mountains are calling, and I must go.