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At the Intersection of Old and New

Authors
  • avatar
    Name
    Louie Knolle
    Twitter

Introduction

Firstly, I am not a cold water expert and will never claim to be. I am however a lover of new things, especially those that make people scratch their head and wonder why. Just a few weeks ago, I decided to take the plunge, quite literally, into frigid waters on a daily basis. I’ve never gone out of my way to avoid fall and winter dips in lakes, rivers, and what have you, but it’s not something you find yourself doing by chance either. Right?

Purpose statement for the outdoorsy and aqua-centric reader:

Being outside is essential for my personal well-being. I fell in love with hiking and spending time outdoors while in college and enjoyed traveling all over the country doing just that. After moving to the Northeastern United States in 2015, I spent the next several years working 100% outdoors as a wilderness therapy field guide, arborist in training, fruit picker, tree farming, and conservation land steward. I would not be who I am today with so much valuable time spent in nature. My goal for this water journey and this blog is to reignite a daily communion with the natural elements and exercise some creative urges in writing about it.

Purpose statement for readers from the tech community:

I’ve spent the last 5 months settling in and gaining my footing in my first full-time developer role. So there hasn’t been much bandwidth for personal projects. I spent over a year coding and job hunting during nights and weekends, it was so important to reclaim that time for myself. That being said, I had that coding itch again and wanted to try out something using Next.js. Currently the beginnings of the blogs are simple markdown files, but I hope to integrate a headless CMS service for blog creation and storage once I find a suitable one. Before that, I will probably create a page with some swimming locations tagged using a mapping API. I’ve used Mapbox in the past and enjoyed using that for projects.

Conclusion

I look forward to seeing where this goes and what becomes of it. Both in terms of how the website grows and just how cold of water my body can handle. If someone eventually finds this useful, all the better! If not, I’ll still be here, swimming in the cold.