I’ve had this blog here for about 6 years now _[wow, really self?! that long?!] _and I never really fleshed out the reason(s) **why **I blog. Here are a couple thoughts that come to mind, but it definitely needs refining.
Sharing the Love…
I would say about 90% of my knowledge as a programmer has been self taught. This isn’t a knock against the school system, but I grew up when personal computers were still very much a “geek” thing to do. We double down on this when it comes to learning web related technologies. I remember taking a computer graphics class where the lectures and assignments were so disjointed, I decided to teach myself Perl and MySQL instead. I would sit in a dark lecture hall and read those books instead. There weren’t any classes covering this more than at a cursory level. As I moved out into my career, the notion of bootcamps, stackoverflow, google, mentorship, all of that was still non-existent. You picked up a book and trudged through the problems until you found them. As I started to have personal coding victories and learn new technology, I realized I would have loved to have had some kind of mentor to catch some of my glaring initial errors and give me some of core coding concepts to help along the way. So I started to blog about them. I once read somewhere that you truly didn’t understand a concept until you could teach it to somebody else, so that was a motivating factor as well. Test my knowledge and help others at the same time. Just trying to be another shoulder for future giants to stand on.
Introspection…
I’ve come to find that there is a lot of “there there” in life. Our beings are both flesh and spirit and that balance (or neglect) plays itself out in a lot of profound ways. I’ll admit I’m rather internal about a lot of these things to the average man on the street and some of this comes from the fact that I don’t have all the answers [duh!]. A professor of mine once gave us the latin phrase “Non supere aude” - “Dare not to know.” This wasn’t a phrase to encourage blind dismissal of something, but to admit when you don’t know something, to be comfortable that you don’t, and to move forward and discover the answer. It’s too easy to feign knowledge and drop it at that. It’s harder to say “I don’t know, help me find out.” So part of my blog (and one rather minimal) is to help me flesh out those things I don’t know. To meditate on the events of my life that matter and discover some of the deeper truths that I get a glimpse of through this. Doing it “publicly” in a blog helps open up a little bit of dialog (we all have something to learn) and gets me somewhat accountable for my ideas (feel free to push back).
So that’s a start. I’m sure there’s more to flesh out, but that’s how it all started and where it’s going to go.