You know, back in high school, I hated writing essays. Maybe part of it was the BS I felt like I had to write for English essays, or the research that came with writing most other papers. Back then, I also maintained a livejournal for a lot of my other thoughts — it always felt like a good outlet (though not the healthiest on some matters haha). When it comes to this little tech blog, I don’t find myself touching it very often. I think part of the issue is that I already do it in bits and pieces all day — write code, write documentation, find bug, fix bug, document.
So what differentiates an entry here from what I write day to day? The first thing that comes to mind is the audience. This really affects what level of perfectionist I’m going to go for and I think that hinders how often I desire sharing stuff with the world, which of course subsequently means a low frequency in entries. It reminds me of how I used to communicate with people online and how often I would delete/modify what I was going to say before I sent it because I needed it to sound “perfect” — whatever that means. The thing is, life doesn’t really work that way — saying the perfect thing doesn’t always help (as if I even knew what was really the “perfect” thing to say), nor is it necessary. I don’t need to put up a front around people I don’t know. The people I am most myself around are also the people closest to me, whose opinions of me affect me the most — so if their view of me affects me the most, why am I not doing all the perfectionist stuff around them? Guess that’s how us human beans work.
People make mistakes. We learn, we grow, and sometimes we shudder at the thought of our old selves (like I do when I think of some of the code I used to write). My entries don’t need to be perfect.
I like helping people with programming issues. This blog is one way to help people out who might run into the same issues as I do — and I think that’s going to be the focus. No matter how stupid I might think something is, I should probably just post it anyway because there’s someone out there googling for a fix for the very same issue. I recently noticed that I actually had some retweets and a fav on Twitter for the last article I wrote on fixing Leiningen in Ubuntu: https://twitter.com/#!/asianexpress/status/126473850279051264 — totally random because I didn’t even realize people were finding my stuff via Twitter (or maybe they found via google then retweeted me, who knows). I also noticed I get a small stream of traffic from people googling SBT, which amused me — mostly because of how complicated that darn thing can be (so much so that most of the Bay Area Scala Enthusiasts group voted for a talk on it).
Anyway, all this to say that I’m going to make a more concerted effort to write a little more about issues I run into that will hopefully help someone out!
Stichomythia 