Moving to a new website

I may come to regret this, but here goes…

I’ve decided to move off of WordPress to a new site at my own domain.

The reasons are not all that complicated. I’ve really enjoyed using WordPress for the past few years; but there are things I’d prefer to do differently. One is to have greater control over the look of the blog (though you’ll notice the new site has a distinctly similar, albeit wider, appearance). Another is to have a better way of writing posts. For a while now I’ve written most of my posts using Markdown, compiling HTML locally on my PC and uploading the result to WordPress. This is a pretty annoying process and also one that leads to discrepancies between my version-controlled blog (on GitHub) and the one hosted on WordPress, as I correct little mistakes or make minor wording changes after publishing.

Anyway, like I said, this may prove to be a mistake. We’ll see. For now, I’ll treat the new site as my official blog and will continue to put links to new posts here on WordPress as I write them, just so that folks don’t forget about me!

Now, check out my new site! And let me know what you think. (By the way, it has a new post about a YAML-parsing gem I wrote.)

Cannibalizing yourself on purpose

This post has moved to my new location, philosopherdeveloper.com:

http://philosopherdeveloper.com/posts/cannibalizing-yourself-on-purpose.html

To start over or continue

This post has moved to my new location, philosopherdeveloper.com:

http://philosopherdeveloper.com/posts/to-start-over-or-continue.html

Raymond Chen has an optimizing mind

I love this post on Raymond Chen’s blog, in which he discusses the challenges of optimizing his route to work each day, accounting for the availability and interaction of multiple bus lines.

Clearly, someone has an optimizing mind.

Am I being obnoxious?

http://philosopherdeveloper.com/posts/am-i-being-obnoxious.html

SOPA and PIPA

I know it’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything; and yes, I am bothered by this and plan (well, hope) to turn that around soon.

I don’t have much to say for myself today, but as it is a big day for the anti-SOPA movement I thought I’d at least use this space to post a link to my company’s (ThoughtWorks) official statement on the issue.

In traditional ThoughtWorks fashion, the statement not only addresses the technical shortcomings of the proposed legislation but also criticizes the process by which it has been drafted and promoted thus far. It was written by the company’s Technology Advisory Board, a group of prominent figures within ThoughtWorks including Martin Fowler.

Hopefully I’ll have a happier (or anyway, less gloomy) post up here in the near future.

Return of the daily post (I hope)

Time for a ridiculous claim: I’m going to get back to daily posts!

Anybody believe me?

[crickets chirping]

No, seriously. I’m going to do it. But here’s the thing: I have become (actually, I’ve always been) very aware that a big part of the reason I hardly ever post anymore is that I try to say too much. I aim to make these big, all-encompassing observations; and it takes so much time (or perhaps the real hurdle is mental energy) to do that, I get discouraged from writing anything at all. This is doubly a problem because when I do get around to writing something, I often end up rushing it and don’t quite cover all the ideas I set out to discuss. So it falls flat.

My new strategy will therefore be to write:

1. More concisely
2. At a narrower scope (without diving quite as deeply into details, or reaching for quite as many connections); and therefore
3. More often!

Hopefully this way I can actually meet my goal. This way I will be able to meet my goal!

Anyway, in the interest of keeping this announcement self-contained, I will leave it at that for now. With any luck, I will write another (meaningful) post later today; but I’m also willing to cut myself some slack and count this as my daily post today for now.

We’re all going to die because you don’t know what a binary tree is

http://philosopherdeveloper.com/posts/were-all-going-to-die-because-you-dont-know-what-a-binary-tree-is.html

Not Solved Here Syndrome

http://philosopherdeveloper.com/posts/not-solved-here-syndrome.html

If you blog it, they will update your ticket

So here’s an interesting sequence of events.

10 AM, January 12th, 2011
I open a ticket on Microsoft Connect about the bug I found in the C# compiler.

7 PM, January 12th, 2011
My ticket gets routed to the Visual Studio Product Team (seems a little weird to me, but OK).

(Months pass.)

March 31st – April 3rd, 2011
I write a couple of blog posts about this bug that I discovered.

April 4th, 2011
My Microsoft Connect ticket gets updated! (And closed, actually; but that’s no surprise. I’d already gotten the “unofficial” response from the C# compiler team via Eric Lippert.)

I don’t know; I just think that’s interesting.