This blog diverges how you’ve probably experienced blogs as episodic and fixed wherein someone writes something complete and fixes it in time. This is especially true of blogs with comments since major changes in content obviate or disconnect from the current content.

I have a folder on my desktop where I’ve kept ideas for writing subjects: it contains many more ideas that I can get to in a day. One competent blog post of around 1,000 words usually takes me about a day of research and writing, but it’s not uncommon to take several days. Often, my idea at the start is unrecognizable or absent in the final result. Sometimes I couldn’t support the original idea and sometimes I’d thought about it so deeply that I discovered I didn’t have a story worth telling. Rarely, the idea disappeared so completely that I abandoned the writing altogether.

As a consequence, I only ever worked on one idea at a time and worked on it until it was done. I’d then work on something else until it was done. This requires long blocks of time to focus on those subjects, and any other idea is just lost.

I imagined something where I could work on something slowly and spread out over time. If I had a half hour, is there some idea that I’ve been mulling that I could add to? More importantly, as I tracked ideas and came across something new, could I add that quickly to a draft? Previously I’d do my research and reading all at once.

So, you’ll see something different here. I allow myself to go back to edit anything without a priori restriction. The ideas may be the same, but I might choose to expand on parts of it or edit away other parts. I treat this entire endeavor as a manuscript in progress rather than a final product.

Along with that, I’ve resurrected some things I wrote but never published, and rescued some worthy things from other sites. Most of these I’ve filed under the time I wrote them, especially since they might seem out of context with a more recent date. In many cases, I’ve adjusted those articles but also linked to the original publication.

All of this is in GitHub, so you can file issues and pull requests, I guess. You can also peek in the _drafts to see what other things I have going on.

About me

You likely know about me from the Perl programming language.

In college I started in the biological sciences, transitioned in to chemistry, then added physics on top of that. In that was a pile of mathematics. I have various publications in those disciplines. Unfortunately for the sciences, my budding computer programming skills were in demand for the tech boom of the 1990s. Besides being a principal in a dot-com bust company, I also led corporate training in various tech subjects. Eventually I started writing books about Perl. I think I’ve authored or co-authored eight distinct titles, many in multiple editions, and appeared as a contributor in others.

I’ve been some sort of consultant since the 1990s too, typically for very short term assignments. My goal in any contract was to work myself out of a job. If I had to stay on at a client, they had a manpower problem instead of a tech problem.