Photo: Ash Edmonds/Unsplash
It’s been a while.
Sorry for the long and unexpected hiatus. I just needed a break from being a pseudo tech journalist. A really long break.
And no, I didn’t go to public relations.
The truth was that I needed a break because I was struggling to keep up with everything I had in my life. Maintaining a graduate job in a tech consulting firm, while running a student hackathon and writing a technology blog was just a bit too much to handle.
And it was easy to simply stop doing TechGeek for a while. Because the job was not fun any more. In fact it was probably doing bad things to my mental health before I took the break. I remember getting pissed off during my final year of University (where I also had a final year project AND a tutoring gig AND running said hackathon) because Vodafone, Optus and Telstra didn’t send me a press release about their upcoming iPhone plans but they did to every other outlet in the country.
Reflecting on that now: I was such an entitled cunt back in those days. I was angry about not being included and decided not to write about it. What the fuck was I thinking?
However, in recent months, I have been trying to figure out how to get back into it the rhythm. While it is stressful, I believe that this is the best time to get back in, where more and more people are looking deeper into tech industry and how technology is changing us – for better or worst. For example: Uber has not only disrupted our taxi industry, it’s disrupting how people are employed through Uber X and Uber Eats.
Plus I love to write, and I’m still paying the hosting bill.
Changes afoot.
But I’m going to do this slowly and do this on my own terms and in my own time. I can no longer pretend that I can file a story and do my 9-to-5 day job.
Incidentally, the site will be changing. The current design just doesn’t suit a “take it slow” approach that I’m adopting. It’s more suited for a site that constantly is following the tech cycle (if you haven’t realised, we might have been inspired by The Verge for some of our previous designs). However, new designs do take time (especially when you’re doing it yourself) and I want to experiment using new technologies – because I’m a web developer at heart. So you’ll (more I than you) have to bear with this design for now.
And there’s a lot of gunk that I would like to rip apart from the old site. There’s ten years of bad code (that I wrote) that I need to fix.
One thing I can change is disabling the comments section, with the aim of removing the entire thing altogether. There’s lots of technical reasons why – such as the page loads faster because it’s not downloading a third party library, no one uses them and instead have conversations on other platforms (like Reddit). However, the main reason is simply I don’t want to be moderating comments and focus more on writing stories. Comments allow people to be their absolute worst. If you have an opinion about the story, you’re free to tweet me on it. It is not the best system, but at least I can choose to ignore/block the stupid and offensive comments.
We’ll see how long this lasts.
xoxo
As a bit of a post-script: recently on Twitter, I was asked why it’s called “Reawaken Media LLC” and if we are an actual LLC. We are not. Fourteen-year-old me thought it sounded cool and that name has kind of stuck for the past ten years.
This made me look back and decide if fourteen-year-old me would like where I am today. The only reason TechGeek started because I had the delusional idea of working at CNET as an editor. This was before I decided to become a developer instead of journalist.
Fourteen-year-old me would probably be disappointed that I’m not working with Molly Wood or Tom Merritt from Buzz Out Loud (remember that!?), but at least I am still writing. Just in a different language. Or languages, for that matter.
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