What this blog is about

This blog is a personal experiment, which means the content and direction are likely to evolve over time. I will aim to have helpful titles and possibly other clever methods to help readers find the content they enjoy, but the reality is I am just getting started and don’t know where this will lead. So let me highlight the three topics I think this blog will be about and maybe explain what a Musing Notion means to me. If you are interested then jump on in to the blog!

Musing Notions eh?

The first logical question is what are musing notions? I honestly don’t really know yet but I will. Lately I have been deep diving into many topics including software engineering, personal training, and personal finance with respect to the F.I.R.E. (financial independence retire early) movement. I enjoy taking walks and thinking about the concepts I have learned in these areas and how they may apply to my life. On the walks you might say I am musing and the applications of these concepts to my own life are notions. It’s probably a silly title and even sillier concept. But, that’s fine by me because that is sorta how I roll.

Software Engineering

The title says software engineering and in fact that is a real interest of mine. To anyone who knows me, this won’t be a surprise but possibly a little odd. Up until now my career has been in FIRMWARE engineering which is close in principal (coding) but vastly different in practice. What got me on the firmware path though was way back in 1999 (or so) me taking a very simple web development class in high school. It was purely done in HTML and I was able to make a font with little ants crawling around it. Small changes could drastically change the look and feel of a web page. From that point on I was hooked. Over the years I have dabbled in this area by making my own webpages including one for my firmware consulting business and making productivity tools to help my day to day work. I haven’t dove fully into it though and that is about to change.

So what will I write about? Well in the coming months (it is currently 2/25/24) I plan on taking some online courses in software engineering. I want to focus on full stack development and will probably interact with many new languages. When I learn something cool or interesting then I will make a post about here. That way I can share what I learn, maybe get feedback on the concept if anyone reads the post (lol), and lock in the knowledge because writing about a topic requires at least a little mastery of it.

Personal Training

Personal Training … what a terrible title. I will maybe need to change it once I figure out what this topic really is. What I can say for sure is that I have a similarly strong interest in training methodologies as I do in software engineering. I spend a lot of my free time learning about new ways to train that I can use in my own home gym. Right, my home gym is probably another topic I will discuss here from time to time. It isn’t just a pair of dumbbells in the garage. I have a pretty sweet setup that gets used 5-6 times a week.

I started to dig so far down the bro-science and fitness rabbit hole that in 2023 I decided to actually get certified as a personal trainer. It took me about 5 months because I still was working full time (and still am) but I was able to successfully get certified through NASM. Learning is a never ending journey and I plan to also make blog posts about new ideas I come across, techniques that work for me, and if I ever start personal training for real then I will probably also share my experience actually working in the field.

Personal Finance and F.I.R.E.

The exact date is a little fuzzy to me, but sometime around 2011 I read a post officially introducing me to Mr. Money Mustache. It is maybe not good sense to plug other blogs from my own, but this one changed my life and if the only thing I do is help other people find it and change their lives too … then this blog will be successful. Around that time I was just starting out my electrical engineering (firmware) career. Actually I started in engineering in 2007. Even so learning about FIRE so early in my career was a game changer. I have always been a “saver” anyway, yet reading about retiring at age 30 and the thought process behind how that was done was very interesting to me. So, I didn’t start as early as MMM, but I did take his concepts to heart and began my own journey.

That is the thing about personal finance. It is PERSONAL. No two journeys will be the same, but many of them can be alike. As I have progressed through my career my salary has greatly increased from those 2007 and 2011 days. Even so, I haven’t really changed how I live and have been able to maintain (and even increase) a pretty crazy savings rate. Along the way I have picked up tips and hard earned lessons about managing this money. As I approach my FIRE number I am also starting to weigh heavier questions and assess the risks of making bold moves. As I learn new things I plan to write blogs about them to pay forward what MMM did for me all those years ago.