simonowendesign to s10wen

At the start of the year I decided to update my online presence from 'simonowendesign' to 's10wen'.

I found that more and more I'm using a username for many services and increasingly so on devices that aren't using a keyboard in the traditional sense.

Getting a typo when typing 'simonowendesign' (although it didn't happen too often) was frustrating, there's also cases where online forms would time out, or the captcha data was wrong, refresh on submit, not save my username and mean I'd have to type it all out again.

I started off as a designer, completing a BTEC National Diploma and BA(Hons) in Graphic Design, so at the time adding 'design' seemed to make sense. Since then I've moved more and more towards Front-End Development and working primarily on the web and although some may still class this as design, I think in the web industry at the minute 'design' is more associated with the visual design aesthetic rather than the code that surrounds it.

I also love short urls such as https://ma.tt, https://p.ota.to and https://g.co/racer.

So I set myself a mission to find a username that resembled Simon Owen and was available for all the social media outlets I use.

Having a fairly common name (currently About 59,300,000 results on Google) is quite frustrating as these usernames tend to go fairly quickly and as I'd initially ran with 'simonowendesign' even more so as I hadn't bagseyd them.

It took a while, but eventually I found it --> 's10wen'.

Now I just need to update and move everything across. I do hope in 10 to 20 years I can look back on this post and think it was worth it.

So there you have it! s10wen it is from now on.