---
title: About me and this blog
base: about 
---

<p class="big"><strong>Welcome!</strong> My name is <a href="https://andrewgioia.com">Andrew Gioia</a> and this website is my effort to write more&mdash;my shorter thoughts and longer form articles on a lot of the things I'm really interested in and care deeply about.</p>

{{< picture 
    source="https://media.gioia.cloud/blog/photos/peartree.sm.min.jpg" 
    alt="Daniel sitting under the pear tree"
    title="Daniel sitting under the pear tree" >}}

**A bit about me:** I grew up outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and moved across the state to Pittsburgh in 2017 with my wife, Beth, our young son, Daniel, and our dog, Maggie. We live in a really old home in the Pittsburgh suburbs with a beautiful bank barn, and we try to spend as much time as possible outside or working on our house.

I've worked remotely for eight years at [TeachBoost](https://teachboost.com), an edtech company I co-founded in 2012, and it'll hopefully be the only job I'll ever have! I like to tinker with home networking and automation, ferment things, and read/watch science fiction.

### What I hope to do with this blog

While I started privately journaling when Daniel was born and have been able to keep that up, I haven't written anything publicly for over a decade. **There's a _huge_ difference between writing for myself and writing for others**, with the later forcing me to really think through my opinions or beliefs. 

I think that the process of writing _why_ I feel a certain way has huge personal benefits, even if no one reads it. I think the Internet needs personal self-hosted blogs more than ever, and I want to help federated content grow. I also hope that publishing can help contribute in some small way to public discourse or to communities I participate in.

Topics I hope to write about include the [Internet](/tags/internet), [free speech](/tags/free-speech), clean air, simple living, home networking, web technologies, fatherhood and [parenting](/tags/parenting), fermentation, home DIY, science fiction, Midwest emo revival, and Magic: the Gathering.

### Getting in touch

You can email me anytime at hi [at] andrewgioia [dot] com, or find me on Mastodon [@andrew@gioia.social](https://gioia.social/@andrew)! You get 100 bonus points if you use Mastodon and help me justify the server costs 😜.