Hello, World!

It's somehow come to seem, in a moment of what may prove to be questionable judgment, that keeping a blog might be a good idea.

Let me reassure you (and myself), though, that I'm not going into this completely on a whim. I do have a few ideas as to how I might execute on this whim plan, and hopefully in five years' time this won't be a spooky internet graveyard that still only has one post.

Short and Sweet

A goal at the inception of this whole idea was to have a place I could jot down quick thoughts—things larger than a tweet but not worth e.g. an entire git repo. With that in mind, I'm aiming to avoid the temptation to write long, over-polished "pieces" here and keep a strong predisposition toward just publishing instead.

Concretely, one way I'm going to steer myself in that direction is with a "Today I Learned" tag that I can use for quick posts to capture things I learn in the course of my day-to-day life. Taking ten minutes to write them up should help me firm up my own understanding, and on the off chance anyone else ends up reading the post, maybe it'll help them out too.

Ongoing Projects

At a slightly more ambitious scale than "TIL", I think there's also value in larger series of posts. I spend a decent chunk of my day at work writing software, and I also help maintain a handful of open-source projects, but sometimes I have an appetite to work on something completely different without necessarily a practical end-goal in mind.

When I take on projects like that, I want to document my progress here as well. Aside from helping me keep track of how I'm coming along, writing up my thoughts is usually a good way of "rubber ducking" for me, thinking through how I'm solving problems and why I'm tackling them the way I am.

I have a couple of projects that have been queued up (behind getting this site off the ground) for a while, and I may turn around and immediately write up an introductory post for one of them just so there's more than one piece of content here before too much time passes.

What May Come

In the end I'm hopeful I'll follow through and this endeavor won't just sputter out, but we'll see what happens. I've gone through the appropriate rites and rituals, and I've paid homage to the Software Powers That Be by kicking off this whole affair with the traditional rendition of Hello, World. That has to be worth some amount of karma right out the gate, right?