Hello World, Why Blog

Hello World! Ok, that’s a start.

This has been more than 10 years in the making. Yes, more than 10 years since I thought about writing a blog post on what I see or saw as the problems with Java programming or predominantly mutable object oriented programming or… many other points of software development. Why so long to write anything? I guess it’s hard to find the time to create content that doesn’t need a lot of investment - a long written well-structured article - or the content is so small that it probably has gone into a StackOverflow question. Hopefully, there is some middle ground been pure Q&A and a longer structured article. Write something, any notes, and more may follow.

Why write at all? There’s the argument that it improves communications skills. Yes, but I did enough of that during a philosophy degree. I’ve also done some company internal blog posts in the past related to performance testing, but that wasn’t on my own time.

Self-advertisement perhaps. Writing about a specific topic can certainly show some knowledge. As a software engineer (or “digital solutions provider” to sound more encompassing) I really appreciate the articles that some individuals or companies put out to help other engineers build something. It makes me think that I’d hire that company if I needed to do that specific thing. It’s more than a portfolio in that it shows the construction process and not just the finished artifact. There maybe some other skills evident from building a blog e.g. setting up web servers, DNS, domain names and site generators; but the blog could also be a paid for hosted solution.

A place to take notes on different topics perhaps. Sure, a post doesn’t have to be a thing of elegance and beauty. I take a lot of notes, about anything, in plain text - todos, technology, household info. It’s easy to sync text between different machines/devices with services like Tresorit, DropBox, One Note and the like. As this blog post is generated from markdown text, a post could just be some published notes.

Sharing experiences that are rarer maybe the most relevant. For example, most professional software development I do these days uses the Python programming language but the way it’s structured / architected owes more to functional first languages such as F#.

We shall see.