This is a new start for me. I’ve held blogs for years, but they’ve always been somewhat unfocused, and in many ways, quite random. Topics have always ranged from football (my poor Redskins), to music, to spiritual life, personal happenings, and what I had for lunch that day, but now that I’m closing in on the big 3-0, I’ve decided that it’s time to be a bit more mature about all of this “writing to the web” thing. So! Here are the new rules of the new blog.
Rule #1. This will be a tech blog. Yes, you heard me, a tech blog. Why a tech blog? Well, to begin with I started working at a company called Sapient Government Services, or as we like to call ourselves, Sapient GS (much more gangster that way), and I quickly found that all of my fellow Senior Technical Associates were writing tech blogs of their own. This seems to be the cool thing to do, and I’m starting to really understand why. Please read.
Reasons To Keep a Tech Blog
It’s Good for Your Career For one thing, as I’ve become more and more “senior” in the development world, I’ve started to see that companies actually WANT you to have a blog. Yes, you heard me right. Its not enough anymore to know how to code, or to know how to use all the latest acronyms and actually know what they mean (AJAX, WPF, WCF, JBOSS, SOA, OOP, PHP, ASP, anyone?) but now you have to actually be able to write about it, or rather BLOG about it. Don’t believe me? Try doing a quick job search and you’ll see one of the newer things they’re looking for is your BLOG. For years I thought this was silly - I mean, who actually has time to code, stay current on the latest trends, and still have time to blog about techie stuff? That was until I realized the second reason why it’s a good idea to keep a tech blog…
You Forget A Crap Load of Stuff The second reason to keep a blog, and in my opinion, the much more practical reason for keeping a blog, is that it’s a good way to remember stuff you’ve done in the past, and as much as I’d hate to admit it, I forget a crap load of stuff! I don’t know how many times now I’ve come across a problem or a technical requirement and I’ve said to myself, “I did this before but I can’t remember what I did.” Then I have to dig through source code from older applications until I realized that I did this years ago on an older computer on another site or that I deleted this project a while back, or that I just can’t find it and I probably just read it somewhere. Having all of this stuff in a blog will allow me to more quickly go back to things I’ve done in the past without having to stress through the ordeal of re-researching something I’ve already figured out. I’ve done this way too many times, so I figured it’s time to learn. After all, Einstein’s definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. If you want to know how I knew that quote, I actually picked it up listening to sports radio – go figure.
Force Yourself to be Smart My third and final reason for keeping a blog comes from a quote that I heard from someone really smart that went something like this, “To truly master something is to be able to teach it.” I think I got it from Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles, or maybe some old Chinese proverb, but either way, I believe it is true. Plus, who knows, in the process of keeping this blog I might actually help some people.. so maybe I’ll include that as my fourth reason.
The Real Final Reason.. to Help People Ah yes, as a developer who has benefited from many random blogs myself, I believe it is time to give back. Here you go all of my faithful listeners (crickets chirping), here are all the answers to all of your technical headaches and development nightmares. Prepare to be educated!! Well, the reality is that there will probably be very few people who read this, but that is fine. I believe that reasons 1 – 3 are sufficient for why this is a good idea, and so I will not be discouraged or saddened by how empty my comments sections are. I will press on, and I will be happy!!
Rule #2. This will be a tech blog. I still haven’t figured out exactly what it means to have a pure tech blog because, this is my first tech blog, ever. I do want to be informative though, and also somewhat entertaining at the same time. The reason I repeated the same rule over is that I realized I didn’t finish what I wanted to say about this being a tech blog, so I will do so here. Being that this is a tech blog, I will try to keep my personal opinions about anything outside of tech stuff to a minimum. That means, no stories about poopy diapers, Redskins talk, or long-winded speeches about the lack of responsibility in today’s parents! This will be a unique challenge in itself as I’m a pretty opinionated guy, and in many ways a storyteller, but a tech blog is a tech blog. Not too much funny stuff buddy!!
Rule #3. See rules #1 and rule #2. This is kind of silly because, well, rules 1 and 2 are pretty much the same thing, but having two rules to a blog is way too simple, plus it makes the formatting look weird. Can you already tell that I’m an experienced blogger? Hang on to your seatbelts people… and prepare to be educated!!
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