Welcome to Steemit, Michael! It sounds like you'll make great contributions to the site. I pretty much found it the same way, hearing about it through my partner and friends, until I finally decided to become a part of the community. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

Here's a tip I was told when I made my #introduceyourself post: whenever you make an original post, like your articles about your current favorite topic, you can call the originalworks bot like this -

Hive account@originalworks

And it'll give you an upvote! Happy steeming!