My 500th Post

When I started I didn’t think it would last

April 2007, my first post, My dog upgrades to Vista.  Looking for ways to improve my creativity, I read The Artist’s Way which talked about journaling and doing three dimensional hands on hobbies to engage different parts of the brain.

Researching Sculpture I decided it was not portable and had too much cleanup. I settled on knitting. I combined knitting and programming in a blog post Jacquard Loom, Punch Cards and PowerShell.

I tried the journaling exercise. Writing a page everyday for a month, I lasted a week or so, writing down whatever was in my head no matter what it was. This gets you into the habit of putting pen to paper and work through your internal critic about writing. For me it didn’t stick but got me thinking.

I picked up a book by a favorite author, Gerald Weinberg, Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method. He makes the analog, writing is like building a stone wall. Builders who do this first need to supply their stone yard. Traveling around they find stones that may be useful for their current wall or are saved for later. He usually has 30+ writing projects going on at all times. I thought blogging would be the way to go.

Weinberg stresses writing about what speaks to you, what you like, keeping you interested and readers typically get what you are saying. I like PowerShell and enjoyed blogging about it.

The 500 posts have concentrated into several categories, PowerShell, .NET, Silverlight, LINQ, Oslo, F#  and others.

In Conclusion

It’s great to be part of the digital conversation. It has excellent benefits. Interacting with a global community, practice at writing, quick feedback on ideas, focusing on and thinking through a problem, learning how to grab a readers attention with a title, reading others writing, paying attention to what I like and incorporating it, having a history of  my writing so I can mine it for style or ideas.

It’s been great and I have had a terrific positive experience.