New Year, New Blog

Published: 2018-01-31

Tagged: thoughts

I've let the weeds grow over this blog of mine. As is usually the case, things happened, time was scarce, and my attention drifted to other things. But the new year came, with its ever-lengthening days, and cracked the ice that's kept me away from my keyboard.

With the new year came new ideas. The first one being that I should divide my existing writing and future writing into two sections: blog posts and essays.

There are times when I want to share an animated cat picture, photographs from a hiking trip, or a sci-fi book review. Just things that I want to get out of my head and to show others. There's no rhyme or reason to them apart from being interesting or fun.

Then there are the times when I want to share something that provides some help to someone, whether it's a "how-to read git diffs" or some tips for designing asyncio-friendly python applications. These usually require a more objective, technical tone, graphs, code snippets, and plenty more words than the first category.

I've changed around some of the code that I use to generate the files for my blog and this is now a reality. This small change has somehow got me very energetic about writing and sharing all the things again.

Another thing that's been on my mind, which you'll probably be seeing more and more of in the Essays section, is that I've been spending more time reading about software architecture and testing and agile. These are all very broad categories, but after saturating my mind with books like "Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests" or "Clean Architecture", some coherent globs are starting to form in my mind about how to think about these things and, more useful, how to make use of this to build better software. Hell, having all this in my head actually makes it possible for me to discern what "better" means and how to align that with other dimensions such as time and value.

This balances out the karma I will lose for submitting random Internet-passerbys to yesteryear's cat pictures, rambling short stories, or op-eds about fixing things.