Hi! My name is Christopher Brown, and I’ve been a programmer for over twenty years. Over those years, I have worked with about a dozen different programming languages, but when given the choice right now, I will nearly always choose to write code in my favorite language, F#.
Blogging and ‘Real World F#’
F# has a wonderfully small and insular community which made me feel like there was an opportunity to grow the language. I followed fsharpforfunandprofit.org religiously, read just about every book I could find, and still, was looking for more. I had learned so much, I decided it was time to start pushing more stuff out there in the world. The world needs F#, and someone else evangelizing it. Hence, this site was initially born as ‘realworldfsharp.org’.
For three years, I blogged as regularly as I could scrape together the occasional F# post, all while trying in my regular job to evangelize better code and better software development practices.
Then, life happened and I fell out of the regular habit of blogging. My last F# code post was in mid 2019. I was using the language regularly, but forgot to write about it. I had new years resolutions plans to resume the blog, but to adjust it to include all my life’s journals and items, and naturally, fell out of habit again.
Why Am I Doing This?
The thing that I found in COVID time was a reset button. With the initial wave of a pandemic, I dove headfirst into distractions I already had, posting on Instagram and liking other people’s posts. Adding folks to my Twitter feed so I could get just as pissed off at what they were pissed off about. I had even considered going back to Facebook. Then, while spending 25 minutes rereading my Instagram feed, something shook loose in my head.
“Why am I doing this?”
With time and introspection comes clarity. Being intentional with my time means deciding what my priorities are, and getting away from the things that do not add the value that I think they do. I had realized that I could log into Instagram once a week from my computer, and get the same value as I was getting while scrolling through the app on my phone every couple of hours.
Being intentional meant, for me, examining what I was doing, and deciding whether or not that was how I wanted to spend my time.
Do I Really Want To Blog?
The tough question came down to actually deciding to blog. I had this F# blog that I had consistently failed to regularly update. I was paying for the hosting and a domain and had to decide if I was going to continue paying for it. While directly doing so, I looked into my old blog pages and found that although many of them were terrible, they were pleasing. I liked writing, and liked having written.
So during the final moments, getting ready to shut this blog off, I did exactly the opposite. I bought a more generic domain name.
I decided I did not need to throw away my blog, but in fact should recommit myself to doing it.
Today and the Future
I reset the site to christopher-brown.blog. This is not an org. This is just me, putting a blog out there. I love F# and will post about it often. There’s gonna be random content about any and everything. There will be programmer-friendly content. There will be career and goals content. There will be wine content. There may even be fitness content, although to spare the reader a terrible view, I promise to minimize fitness-related photos.
I believe I am here to help. I hope you find something in this site that helps you.
I’m a father of 3, a girls’ softball and football coach, and a Staff Software Developer for Chewy.com. Prior companies I’ve worked for had strict rules about employee blogs, so if ever mentioned in this blog, it be mentioned as {Redacted.}
I speak occasionally at developer meetups, mostly related to F# and career growth.
Christopher Brown's - Blog 