New City, New Job, New Content

New City, New Job: Headed to Michigan and Working at Sanity with map in the background showcasing the route from Memphis to Michigan

Those of you who follow me on Twitter and hang out with me in various community chats may know that I’ve been focused on moving for the past month or so. Something you may not be aware of is that I’ve also been getting ready to start a new job, as well.

When you change one thing in your life, you might as well change a lot, right?

The Move: Memphis to Michigan

I grew up in Memphis. It’s near and dear to my heart. I’ve lived in other cities, but Memphis is one of my favorite places. Memphis will always be a home to me, as my family is there and my first tech family is there, as well.

Community is important in so many ways. I had been a developer for 5-6 years before getting involved in a local tech community. It wasn’t until I joined one that I feel like I found my own way. 

I have Brad Montgomery and the wonderful Mempy community to thank for getting me into the broader #memtech community. I have Joe Ferguson to thank for pushing me to run my own meetup and organize larger events. 

Being a local organizer was an amazing experience, and I met so many people that I consider lifelong friends. The amazing thing about the internet and the tools we have is that I don’t have to give up that community. I plan on lurking and participating in #memtech going forward from a different location.

I’ll also continue running Web Workers as an online meetup. Whenever it’s safe to start local, in-person meetups again, I’ll help Josh find a good co-organizer to keep that going.

New Job: Developer Relations for Sanity.io

Many of you know that for the past year and a half, I’ve been pursuing what I’ve referred to as “Free-agent Developer Advocacy.” I’ve loved doing it.

I’d originally intended a lot of content focused on CSS. I found, however, that I enjoyed talking more and more about the Jamstack. I’d also found a lot of traction with my Jamstack projects (That’s My JAMstack, anyone?). I fell in love with the Jamstack methodology, community and, of course, 11ty.

Fast forward to the past few months, I decided I wanted to get back into “gainful” employment. I knew I wanted to find work with a Jamstack company doing this sort of educational and community work.

As luck would have it Sanity.io was looking to grow its Developer Relations team. After a lot of amazing conversations, I decided to come on board with the Sanity team.

I’m a bit odd in that I love talking about the usability of content management.  I have spent a lot of my career training people and working in various CMSs. I trained an entire newsroom in how to use Ellington. I worked on a proprietary small-business CMS and trained clients in it.

Sanity’s focus on the future of not just CMSs but structured content in general really hit home with me. I feel like it’s the perfect fit for the next stage of my career!

Where will I be headed in the near future

What does this mean for folks who enjoy the content that I produce? 

The main thing is that you should see more content coming. A lot of that content will be focused around Sanity or the Jamstack or how to deal with content. I’ll be spinning my Twitch stream back up. I’ll be helping Sanity with their official streaming channel. I’ll be writing and recording about all the things I was already interested in.

I’m really excited by this job and by the conversations I’ve had with the amazing Knut Melvær on where we’re going with DevRel at Sanity. If you like my 11ty content, some of my first official content for Sanity will be integrating 11ty and Sanity together!

Good things are coming and I hope you enjoy it.