Friday, March 21, 2008

Jumping on the Bandwagon

Well, I finally broke down and I'm going to take a stab at this whole blogging thing.

Until recently, blogging wasn't really something I'd considered. In terms of technical trends, although I'm probably as aware of them as you're average technical geek - and certainly more so that your average consumer, when it comes to adoption I tend to stick to the 'knee of the curve'. I think this is a good place to be in terms of adopting technology in general. As interesting as the bleeding edge can be it is, as many smart people before me have pointed out, a good place to get cut. My attitude is, if I can wait for a more mature product/device/service/framework/whatever without suffering any negative effects by waiting, then I will. This invariably results in a much more cost-effective investment in terms of time, money, or effort. I'd recommend that everyone follow this course, but if they did, the knee would never come. We need mad scientists, hackers, dabblers, visionaries, and people with to much time on their hands to push the bleeding edge out and chase the bugs and monsters out of newly claimed territory.

Anyway, blogging is a technical trend that I've certainly benefited from but, like online social haven't had a compelling reason to jump on board with personally. If you're a technophile like me, you've have certainly benefited from other bloggers as I have. Probably half the valuable hits I find when googling for technical information winds up being on some dude's blog. My attitude regarding blogging has changed from thinking of it as either a dalliance or an activity practiced by more seasoned writers to thinking of it much more as a social collaboration tool.

So why jump in? Well, the way I see it, social collaboration works better the more people participate. Not that long ago, there weren't that many people blogging and all the useful online info in terms of software development was coming from more formal online documentation or message boards. So I figure, hey, I've benefited many times from some geeks blog, why not join them.

So...my intent is to post articles about tough technical problems I work through, as well as some that maybe aren't so tough, but lack a predominance of information on the web. Also, I'll probably babble on about cool stuff I've encountered, or others geeky things. We'll see if I stick with it. The reality is, it takes time to type this stuff up, and I often have things I'd rather spend that time on. Then again, I work through challenging development issues all the freakin' time...so why not "give back" some sage advice from time to time? Also, I readily admit, my memory just ain't what it used to be, so I figure it can serve as a useful personal archive.

Happy reading,

Andrew (Andy) Coulson
Software Developer, Consultant, and Technophile