I am a professional software engineer and like most professional software engineers I search for  answers to questions I have coding nearly every day.  Also, like most professional software engineers I have attempted to blog a few times in the past and have made it to around blog post #3 before giving up.

This time I intend the results to be different and to think about the missteps I have made in the past that resulted in my blogs being, essentially, still-born.

Too Specific

Each time I had started a blog previously I had a very specific goal in mind.  Usually that goal was to write coding articles, discuss politics, or analyze non-fiction writing from an Objectivist perspective.  Each time I got bored.  This blog will not be so specific.

Now I don’t want this to be a place where I talk about what is going on in my personal life every day or post pics of what I am eating (it’s probably chicken wings).  I want this blog to be useful.  Useful to coders stuck on a problem or useful to an individual who feels like everyone else is fucking insane with their nonsense ideas.  So with that in mind, around half the posts will revolve around coding with the rest delving into philosophy and politics.  It’ll ebb and flow as the mood strikes me or as one of those topics becomes more relevant in my life.

Too Academic

I found that in my previous blogs I tried to write with a voice that wasn’t my own.  During my day…usually a lot… I find myself cursing or coming up with analogies to help explain what I’m thinking but in my previous blogs I strayed away from that to try and give an impression that I was professional or “above it.”  Well fuck that.  It’s not how I think, its not how I speak, so it shouldn’t be how I write.  Hopefully this means that my posts can come more frequently and easily and I won’t spend as much time rewriting my own words until they’re not.

Too Inconvenient

I had always blogged from my desktop at home before and I think this made it “a thing” I had to do at night after chores were done or between games I’d play.  WELL NOT ANYMORE.  I decided to forgo trying to write my own site or build my own blog software or any of the other insane things we developers try to do to avoid using someone else’s software.  This time I decided to go with a simple WordPress blog that I can install in one click and already has an app for my phone so I can write articles on my way into work or, more likely, while I’m on the toilet.  Nuggets of wisdom can drop while I drop other nuggets now.