Cooking my brand like homemade spaghetti

CJ Taylor · May 7, 2020

Projects   Branding   Learning

Table of contents

  1. Table of contents
  2. Howdy
  3. Throwing spaghetti at the wall
  4. Boiling your noodle
  5. Al dente - bluegrass.dev
  6. Plating my dish
  7. Can we eat now

Howdy

Howdy, folks -

Personal branding isn’t something I’ve thought much about in the past. I’m one that believes consistent actions speak for themselves. But with an upcoming commitment to speak at, it dawned on me that I have no consolidated place for folks to go!

Hope you like the talk and if you want to find out more, check out:

Excellent user experience, right? Not in my mind. I got motivated to create a single place where folks can deep-link to specific events, all the needful call-to-actions, and opportunities to share more on how the presentation came to be and evolved. I was left with an itch in my brain, saying, “figure it out, you’ll thank yourself later!” So, onto ideas, we go!

Throwing spaghetti at the wall

Some call this generating a “word cloud” or “mind mapping” to organically generate a consolidated idea from throwing words out there and connecting them to see what can stick. So, I went about “throwing spaghetti at the wall” to see what would stick.

  • Goal
    • Document what I do and share with others for ease of access and cross-referencing
    • Package it all up in an authentic way
  • About me
    • Jovial
    • Self-driven
    • Coffee for days
    • Lives in Kentucky
    • Writes most, if not all emails with “Howdy,” “Howdy, folks -,” “Cheers,” salutations
    • Gets attributed for being from a big city despite being from “this sticks” of Kentucky
  • About what I do
    • Software Engineering
    • Develops in whatever languages or tools that best fit the problem
    • Critical thinking
    • Self-teaching when I don’t know something

Boiling your noodle

After my ~30 minute exercise to get to the above listing, I wanted to “aim small, miss small.” So, I boiled down what my noodle came up with some word association.

  • About me
    • Kentucky
      • The Bluegrass State
      • Motto: “Unbridled Spirit”
      • Derby => horses => they gallop => in fields
  • About what I do
    • Software Engineering => a field of study
    • Software => Can be open/closed source
    • Develops => To dev or to write code => dev => .dev => a Generic Top Level Domain that exists
    • Language/tool agnostic => multiple “fields” of study (frontend/backend/database/infrastructure/etc.)

My Generated motto: “An unbridled spirit that gallops around the open fields of software.”

Okay, now we’re cooking, a much smaller target! Off to Namecheap.com, I went searching for various keywords.

Searches:

  • Domain searches:
    • Kentucky software
    • Bourbon and dev
    • bluegrass Fields of software
    • Bluegrass
  • TLDs (Top Level Domains)
    • .xyz
    • .dev
    • .com

Al dente - bluegrass.dev

Where I landed:

bluegrass.dev

So brief, but it seems like it articulates where and what enough to click to find out more.

Bewilder, it was available; I bought the domain on Namecheap.com. Next step hosting. I wanted a quick and easy way to spin up a static site without a concern for cost or configuration. For this, I turned to an old friend, Github Pages.

Plating my dish

Ingredients cooked up, my last step was to plate the dish before serving for consumption.

Goal: Github Pages, update via commit a minimal content focused website.

Seeing as my target was to provide more text-centric content, it felt like a good “documentation” experience would be nice.

Github Pages “Just the docs” Jekyll theme demo: https://pmarsceill.github.io/just-the-docs/

Excitingly enough, Github’s supports the ability to reference a “remote theme”

Following through the steps for establishing a Custom Domain for a Github Pages site, I had this wired up in the basic form in about 20 minutes!

Can we eat now

Here’s where you can see everything in action!

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