First post

Holy cow, it’s a blog.

Yes, this is the first post on my first blog. I never thought I’d have a blog, and never thought I’d want one. I sure never thought it would start with me typing ‘Holy cow’, but there you go. It started out as ‘Holy crap’ but that just felt wrong. Cows are okay. There is nothing bad to say about cows, I guess.

Any ways …

Why do I need a blog?

To be fair, I’m not entirely sure that I really need a blog. For now, it’s more like an experiment, which I hope will help me order my thoughts and satisfy my need to explain things to people. I really like explaining stuff because I love watching that smile on a person’s face get wider as they figure something out. Unfortunately, my fiancé isn’t that much into nerdy stuff and explaining the same to her makes her doze off quickly. My son is just under 7 months old and all he really wants to do is laugh a lot and chew on people’s noses. My co-workers are out of the question too, as they don’t care for anything outside their work-related JavaScript realm.

This leaves myself, since I also love learning new stuff pretty much all the time. Most of the time, however, I will relearn stuff that I once knew because I am cursed with a weird memory. I can remember anything from phone numbers and IP addresses to long random passphrases rather well, but my memory will give in quickly once it must deal with complex workflows. In the past, I would document everything I don’t do regularly in a private wiki installation hosted on my local server. Articles in this wiki include the LAN infrastructure in my flat and all registered clients, the sequence of commands to replace a faulty hard drive with mdadm and trigger a re-sync or just the recipe to my favourite spareribs rub. Because I only must deal with those things rarely, related information is being garbage-collected quickly, which is why I need to write it down.

But a private wiki can’t be shared with others (hence private). This is where this blog steps in. I plan to write down whatever useful I learn when doing research. This research may be work related or just a matter of personal interest. There is going to be a significant amount of programming chatter, but I don’t intend to create another coding blog. I do intend to write good quality posts, but to be entirely honest it could go either way. Hopefully it won’t become another of those dreadful blogs that lure you in using fancy design, only for you to realize that it’s researched or written poorly. I hate those.

I believe that publishing data motivates most authors to do a better job at writing and researching, and so I hope the effect will rub off on me too. I will get back to this statement in the future. Coming up next is a list of mistakes in software development I have made over and over in the past and the consequences that came with them.