Cleaning Out the Skeletons

An Effort to Put My Best Foot Forward

Growing up at the start of social media has its downsides. Today I talk about cleaning up my online presence.

Motivation

Cultivating a professional online presence is something that I've been casually working towards this year. In fact, I mentioned in a previous post that one of the main reasons that I started this blog was to further that goal.

In my mind, there are two important steps along the way to building something I'm proud of: cleaning out low-quality content from the past and adding new high-quality content going forward.

Out With the Old

Now begins the painstaking task of combing through every old post, tweet, status update, etc. that I've ever posted. If you've ever been a teenager, you probably know the kind of things that I'm sweeping under the rug here: teen angst, vaguely subtextual nonsense, humble brags, and any of the other cardinal sins of social media.

I've never publicly acknowledged it before, but for a while in college, I was lost. I didn't know what I wanted with my life, I wasn't happy with myself or the things I was doing. I felt depressed and anxious every day. I put a lot of my worth in other people. Many of my core values and perceptions of the world were changing for the better and I was experiencing growing pains. As you can imagine, I posted some things that I'm not proud of. I also posted a lot of things that bring back painful memories as I look back on them today.

I'm extremely fortunate that I have some truly amazing people in my life who helped me get through that tough time. In hindsight, I know that I'm a stronger, more well-rounded person because of it. It's important to acknowledge and accept that part of my life while also putting it behind me. I'm not trying to whitewash my past, just tidy it up into a more streamlined representation of the personal growth I've experienced in the past decade.

In that spirit, I tried my best not to delete something that was merely a bit embarrassing or weird. I was only looking to clean up the really dumb or meaningless posts. Things like the short tweet “I'm too drunk for this.” from my junior year of college. It doesn't add any value to my story and it just looks bad in hindsight.

But I'm Still a Hoarder

Switching gears a bit, another benefit of combing through all of this is that it lets me archive anything I want to save. For instance, before I realized that I would someday look back on these things, I didn't save copies of pictures that I uploaded to Facebook or Instagram.

One of my biggest pet peeves with any software or service is vendor lock-in. Someday, I want to be able to close these accounts and not feel like I'm deleting data that I want to keep. Since I was going back and reading everything I ever posted, it made perfect sense to multitask and get copies of everything to store in my personal cloud.

In With the New

Adding new quality content to my accounts is the exciting part. Writing for the blog has been a fun part of the past few months. I always enjoyed reading tech news and learning new things. I tinker on side projects that never see the light of day. It's all helping me to be a better person and be better at my job. It only seems natural that the next step is to start sharing it.

Hopefully publishing side projects and sharing my take on the trends in my industry will help build a brand that represents me and my abilities accurately. Even better, it should help me learn and acquire new abilities that stretch beyond programming and into the interpersonal and marketing worlds.

Alright, Wrap It Up Already

This ended up being a really personal post that definitely falls ~~at least a bit~~ squarely under the #ramblings category in the blog subtitle. It's hard to push the post button when you're exposing yourself like this. I think it's good to push those comfort zones back though. Having an opinion and working on articulating myself certainly aren't things to be ashamed of but still... I hope this won't be one of those posts I'm cleaning up 5 years from now!