I was motivated to start writing after reading Matt Swanson’s article “Do things, write about it” on hacker news yesterday. I posted a comment on HN asking what’s a good way to put up a development blog, and Mr. Swanson and others recommended jekyll and github pages, so here we are.
I’ve had a blog before, but I was terrible at updating it. I think that’s because I was being too much of a perfectionist: I spent about a month polishing my “article” before posting it. (I did get a bunch of hits from it, but man was it painful to produce.)
I’m working on a side project, and I wanted to document how things are going, and also have a place to post tips or fixes as I find them. For example, I got a nasty issue with my site going down because I changed my .bash_profile to exec screen on startup, and somehow that took down Passenger on my production site. It would have been perfect to post the error message here, in case someone else gets the same issue they could google the fix.
Anyway, my goal is to post here pretty regularly. I’m not going to try to target the quality level of a book or anything this time, but maybe more the quality level I would use for email to a group of ten other programmers at work about something important. I think that will be a good balance so I can post stuff I’m not ashamed of, and still actually get stuff posted without endless noodling.
Christopher Brooks 13 August 2013