[nostrademons]

I don't blog about programming for different reasons...

I find that any really interesting programming problem is too complex to be reduced to prose in a form digestible in someone's 10-minute blog break. Yeah, I could post about the umpteenth-zillion Sudoku solver, or about this tricky Haskell problem I solved - but if it's general enough to be broadly interesting, it's too shallow to be enlightening, and if it's deep enough to be useful, it's probably too specific to have a widely interested readership. Worse, I feel that by participating in the blogosphere, I'm deluding myself into thinking that these information soundbites are worth anything, and taking up my attention with little factoids that distract me from getting actually interesting work done.

I find that the value of writing about programming is in the "Why?" and the "Roads not taken" of software systems. So I keep a development journal of my personal projects. At the very least, it keeps me from revisiting design decisions I've already decided. But this doesn't need to be public to serve its purpose, and I've found that making it public anyway is too distracting to maintain forward momentum on the projects. Instead, I open things up after the project has succeeded or failed, like I did with Diary of a Failed Startup and like I'll hopefully do with this programming language I'm developing. No, it's not the ego boost that constant, instantaneous feedback gives you - but that ego boost becomes a drug that keeps you from functioning when people (as the article points out) turn on you, as they inevitably do.