About
Welcome to Soul Repairs! We write about the following here:
- God
- People
- Organizations/Organizational Culture
- Religion
- Processes
- Technology
- Some combination of any or all of those things at once
We acknowledge that this is an odd list, a list that doesn’t seem to fit together. These are the things that we love, though, and there are common threads in all of them – and explaining the threads of one to help explain another is the purpose of this blog.
It’s simple, not easy.
This sentence is at the top of the blog. It’s the motto…tagline…thing.
Laine’s explanation:
It refers to…most everything when it comes to trying to be who God wants you to be and do what he wants you to do. What he wants isn’t complicated (simple), it just…sometimes seems impossibly difficult to do (not easy).
Josh’s explanation:
Doing life right is hard. A lot of times it seems it’s hard because it’s complicated. But we’re sure it’s actually because it requires dedication to a few simple things. We believe strongly in the power of determination and commitment – that in the end, not quitting will get you farther than figuring out a trick.
About Josh
Hey, welcome to our blog! I’ve been in IT for 15 years. I’ve been a developer, lead dev, tech lead, architect, and enterprise architect. I’ve worked on big teams, small teams, and been on a team of one. I’ve learned a ton, and I love to mentor and share what I’ve learned.
I love strategy – laying out plans and figuring out dependencies, which order to do things in. I especially love the complicated business + people + culture + tech of IT strategy.
I love people and technology deeply – especially technology that makes the lives of people easier.
I love creating content, solving problems, and content that helps people solve problems.
I enjoy music, play guitars a bit. I love video games like Fallout New Vegas and Metal Gear Solid. I have a little dachshund who is my puppy buddy.
About Laine
Hey, that’s me. Hello! I’m Laine. Professionally, I’ve been a computer programmer, a technical lead, a stay at home mom, and an IT architect – and that last was a broad enough title that it let me do technical things and cultural things. I realized then that that was my favorite place to be, in that in-between place of technology and culture. I tend to think I prefer culture until I can dig into a new or interesting technology and then I’m like, oh right, I am a nerd at heart…
In my free time, I play guitar, sing, write music, knit, read, do puzzles, and try various random hobbies that make pretty things. (Why do my hobbies make me sound like I’m a really cool 70 year old? 🤔 Oh well, I accept this.)
Why We Write Together
You may notice that on almost every post, the author is listed as both of us. We purposely installed and nerded the blog plugin that would allow for that, because it’s most reflective of the reality of how we write. Ideas fall out of Josh’s head at an alarming and impressive rate, but they lack clarity and connection. Laine can’t start a blog post to save her life and can’t find the beginning thread to explain information linearly very well – but her native language is connections. Also, unclear word choices and ideas annoy her enough that she’s occasionally annoying about it.
We started writing together on accident, on a different blog – Josh would write posts, Laine would volunteer to edit. At some point we realized that it wasn’t so much author and editor anymore – we couldn’t tell who had written which words, and the end result was significantly better and often significantly different than either of us would have done on our own. We also very much enjoy the process of discussing (arguing) the content of the posts, and usually that results in better posts too.