Two weeks ago the Upstate NY AIGA Chapter held its first Design Week and hosted the second annual Create Upstate conference. I was lucky enough to attend through Mohawk and found inspiring and creative takeaways in all of the talks from local designers, developers, and entrepreneurs.

This past Thursday, Fresh Tilled Soil held an event called Experience:Dev for the first time. The event focused on a closer look at development and UX practices, running teams of developers, and different approaches and dynamics in this field. I attended the conference with a web developer, and found it interesting to be able to compare our experiences and thoughts in between each talk.

A few weeks ago I was one of the speakers at the Upstate NY AIGA Portfolio Building Workshop held at The Foundry for Arts, Design + Culture in Cohoes, NY. 13 talented designers, educators, artists, and design/creative business owners talked about their experiences in the field relating to hiring, job searching, interviewing, portfolio making, and more. It was a hugely inspiring event, not just for the 80+ design students who attended, but for me, too.

2013 was a great year, but it seems like it’s been leading to even great things for 2014. I’ve started making more of a presence professionally in my field; I’m comfortable taking on freelance projects and consulting gigs (and I love it!); and I’m discovering more and more of an amazing community that exists for project managers.

Blogging, to me, describes a place where I am expected to post in a timely manner, always refreshing my content and posting lists and roundups and scheduling posts that are planned in an editorial calendar and with a marketing purpose in mind. That’s not me. I don’t want to post according to a schedule – I want to write to make sense of the thoughts and words in my head, when they are relevant enough to share with this slice of the internet.

After a week knocked off my feet by the flu, I’ve had lots of reading to catch up on. Here are a few of my favorite links from the Thanksgiving break as well as this past week:

I became a project manager after working as a SEO technician for a few months. Going from the serene, quiet environment of research and coding all day to a client-facing position with meetings and phone calls all day was quite the change! In my first few months as a project manager, I quickly learned many things the hard way.

A few weeks ago something called the Digital PM Summit took place in Philadelphia, the first conference for managers of digital projects. I read about it too late to physically be there, but I’ve followed all of the coverage leading up to the conference, during the conference, and now all of the great roundups being posted by PMs who participated in this event (in person or remotely!).

Welcome to the third or fourth reincarnation of this blog! I’ve gone from writing about my general experiences in grad school, to travel blogging, to food blogging, now to professional/career blogging. I love drawing the lines between what I do and what I’m learning from it every day – and I think this is a great way to do it.