The Road Made by Walking
Almost 20 years ago, I started a blog called WalkingRandomly following a pub conversation with Matt Haworth. Matt was leaving The University of Manchester, where we both worked at the time, and would go on to do great things as the co-founder of Reason Digital. I had a vague idea of wanting to write about maths, programming, science…whatever came up really. Matt took me seriously and a little later he emailed me with the log-in details of a WordPress instance on a server that he owned.
Setting up your own website was rather more difficult back then compared to now and I’ll be forever grateful to Matt for this act of kindness and for keeping the website alive all these years. Thank you, Matt!
At its peak, WalkingRandomly enjoyed over 500,000 unique visitors a year and arguably helped propel my career much further than it would have gone without it.
In the early days I’d write several times a month about whatever was going through my head in the moment. At some point, however, life got in the way and I didn’t have time to devote to the site. Posting frequency vastly reduced and eventually stalled completely.
In 2021 I joined MathWorks, the makers of MATLAB and Simulink, and in 2022 they handed me the reins to their flagship blog The MATLAB Blog. This, combined with a busier than ever family and professional life, gave me even less time to write anything for personal reasons and WalkingRandomly.com fizzled out.
The Road Still to Walk
Recently, I’ve been feeling the need to start writing again. Not for professional reasons, not for any reasons to be honest other than as an outlet for the thoughts banging around in my brain.
I could, of course, just pick up where I left off and start publishing to WalkingRandomly.com again. I’ve thought about doing this many times but for reasons I can’t quite figure out, it’s not what I want to do. Maybe I want the freedom of not needing to live up to what that site used to be? I don’t know…
I want to start again. So here we are!
What to expect
I’m Still Walking Randomly. There will be mathematics, computing and all that stuff but you can expect this iteration to include a lot more random stuff outside of all of that. I’m older now and I’ve got stories I want to tell; many of which have absolutely nothing to do with technical computing. You know that guy at the bar who tells stories whether or not anyone is listening? Yeah, I’m that guy now.
I’m not aiming to build an audience, further my career or become an influencer. I just want to write again; about whatever springs to mind. A log of my thoughts which I’ll put on the web. A web-log if you will.
I’d be honoured if you’d join me.