The first step is always the hardest. Mustering that extra energy that’s necessary to get moving, which automatically leads to the realization that the decision to try something new has actually been made. This is especially true if you are trying something that you weren’t really convinced of not too long ago.
I’ve been a little bit skeptical about the whole blogosphere as a lot of it seemed like random noise that was large revolving around itself. However, after stumbling over solutions to technical problems I was facing in posts that came up in Google and discovering the value of reading development related blogs for keeping up with current industry issues, I started to reconsider my point of view. There was suddenly an urge to chime into some of the discussions or to give back some fix suggestions for issues that I had to figure out myself.
Opinions
To dip my toes into the water I started an internal blog for the development team in the compay I work for. This was at first just intended to improve communication in the team, which worked out great. After some time, though, I caught myself putting more general thoughts into some posts which went beyond the character of internal communication. Some of these topics reflected current debates that were raised on popular programming blogs or in podcasts, which were picked up within our team and resulted in interesting discussions.
Some of the internal contributions made to those debate were quite intriguing, and I realized the value of getting feedback and the potential that a blog has as a medium. So part of the reason for putting up a public blog is to be able to participate in some of those distributed pondering of ideas and opinions.
Being a German software developer working in an international team in Taiwan with an English and Chinese speaking environment, there is of course also the faint hope that the rather uncommon circumstances of my professional life could provide some interesting insight to other people out there. I would currently consider that more a nice by-product than an integral part of the experiment, though.
Technical notes to self
Everything mentioned above about the exchange of ideas and participation in debates of course assumes that there is somebody actually reading what I am coming up with here. At this point, though, I am pretty sure that I am writing for nobody else but myself and Google – given that their algorithm deems anything here worthy of indexing.
As mentioned before, having a Google indexed scrap pad with notes of technical nature is the other major motivation for starting this experiment. For now I will consider the description of technical challenges and the solutions I’ve found as notes for myself, the blog simply serves as incentive to actually write them down which hopefully makes it easier to remember them or to find them more efficiently. If somebody finds them helpful, that’s even better. I could count that as good Karma as I would finally be able to give back to the hordes of software developers from whose posts and forum contributions I’ve profited so often before.
It seems like the first step has been made, there is now a real post that somewhat outlines the purpose of this blog and serves as a reminder to myself. Now, I “just” need to follow up with some real content – this feels a little bit like a new feature that is almost finished as the prototype works, it’s “just” the actual implementation that’s missing.