Substitute for Thinking

To those of you out there still checking in here, much appreciated. Much surprised, too. It's been a while since I've found the time to post anything which is, I suppose, a sign that things are going well within the scope of this whole new careerscape. Work and business opportunities have been trickling in, and I've had a chance to meet with many people (probably some of you) to discuss some exciting and potentially very interesting projects. So even though I don't feel all that brokenhearted that I've not posted in an unforgivably long time, I still have a little bit of a lingering unpleasant feeling from knowing that I have an orphaned blog out there somewhere.  He has my name, but still I've abandoned him, and the longer I avoid him, the more embarrassed and less motivated I am to try to reconcile with him.  Damn you, Guilt, why must you torment me so?!

Sorry, I had a little bit of a Charleton Heston moment there.

The point is that, at least intellectually, I think that blogging is a capital-G, capital-T Good Thing® and doubly so for someone who finds himself in shoes like mine.  (But not my actual shoes because, let's face it, the width is going to cause problems for you even if you can get used to the odor.)  It doesn't matter who you are, if you're trying to keep up a blog or any other habit, the inspiration dip is going to hit you too, and when it does, all the good intentions in the world aren't going to do a thing for you.  The difference between taking a couple of days away and having that thing perpetually stuck near the bottom of your to-do list is just a matter of knowing why you're doing it.  So with that in mind, I give you a few of my own reasons why I'm coming back to my blog.

1. Blogging is good for business.  You're about to say, "Well, duh!" but since I started writing this blog, I've heard from a lot of old friends, former co-workers, and past business contacts, and some of those conversations and e-mails have generated projects and leads.  I don't want you to feel that I'm underestimating your intelligence by stating the obvious here.  Rather, I'm stating the obvious so that the obvious doesn't become conspicuous by its absence and, thus, cast suspicion on the entire post.  Blogging is good for business just like giving lectures or writing a book or anything else that builds your public reputation, but if that's your complete list of reasons for writing a blog, you probably won't stick with it for very long.
2. Blogging keeps your writing skills sharp.  I've always been a decent writer, and I've found one thing to be true: good, coherent writing is indicative of a broader tendency toward clear, effective thinking. If someone is able to sit in a chair, think deeply about a given concept, decide what words and sentences are essential to describing that concept, and write it all down in a way that communicates to most other people, that's a person who can do just about any kind of knowledge work you can throw at him.  The guys from 37signals have this to say in their book Getting Real: "If you are trying to decide between a few people to fill a position, always hire the better writer. It doesn't matter if that person is a designer, programmer, marketer, salesperson, or whatever, the writing skills will pay off. Effective, concise writing and editing leads to effective, concise code, design, emails, instant messages, and more."  I couldn't have said it any better myself.
3. Blogging lets you clarify your thoughts on a subject.  Some people pay a therapist, others get a blog, I guess.  While it's pretty unlikely that I would use this as a space for discussing confusion from my childhood or fishing for amateur interpretations of the dream I had last night, I think it can be pretty helpful as a means -- first, through the act of writing, and then, through feedback and revision -- for clarifying what I think and feel about certain subjects (within the scope of this blog's subject matter).
4. Blogging gives you a voice. When Sun announced that they were buying MySQL a couple of months back, I wrote a little bit about it a couple of days after the fact.  I remember feeling good writing that entry because here was this far-away, far-out deal that I had nothing to do with, but by virtue of having an internet connection and an opinion, I could say something about it and join the army of confused people who care about one or both companies, people who rely on their products to make a living, people who couldn't stand to see another screw-up like the one they really hoped they weren't just witnessing.  Moral to the story: you don't need to be an A-lister to have your say.
5. Blogging allows you to give away useful knowledge.  Internet culture is very much a gifting culture.  People open their free web browsers and expect to be able to access services without payment or restriction: news, reference information, applications, and so on and so on.  The open source community is even more about giving away your best work in exchange for fame and status, at least within that small segment of the population who cares. I always got the biggest thrill out of programming from knowing that someone out in the world somewhere might be using some code that I'd written.  They probably didn't even know my name, but they were getting some measure of value from the work I'd produced.  A blog is just another vehicle for that same impulse except that it's not as tightly constrained by syntax and structure as a programming language would be.

I've been working for about a month now trying to put together a semi-coherent website for my business as a freelance software developer, architect and all-around guru. For someone of my particular disposition, this is no mean feat. I'm not really a designer, but in that time I've come up with a number of passable but not awe-inspiring concepts in a variety of color schemes. I've learned a good deal more than I knew before about CSS, web standards, design and layout, color theory, and so on; but I wouldn't say that any of this knowledge or experience
has turned any of various piles of files sitting on my hard disk into the Mona Lisa.

But as tough as working on the design has been, writing the copy for the site has been ten times harder. How much content do I really need? What are the five things that absolutely must be said pertaining to X? What kind of tone should I use? Professional and knowledgeable? Conversational and clever? Do I really know the reader well enough at this point to engage them in witty banter? Will that come across as presumptuous? Dear God, will anybody love me?!

As these things often do, it took some trial and error (and ultimately a dose of desperation) before I was able to see the simple truth that had been before me all along: that I don't need a website. Or rather, I don't need one in the sense that I'd been thinking about all this time, at least not today. Because today what am I? I'm a guy who's getting out of corporate IT in the hope that I'll be able to do more satisfying work, provide better services for customers and the community at large without all the red tape, work on some of my own ideas, have more freedom as to how I do my job and organize my day, earn more money, spend more time with my family and friends, and generally feel that my life is more integrated than it is today. Beating my brains in trying to find just the right collection of buzzwords and stock photos to tell people that I deliver superior value by providing services that are agile and cost-effective and blah blah blah only begins to sound like some nonsensical departmental strategy document and subverts my stated goals before I ever really get started. What's the use in proclaiming the benefits of simplicity if you don't follow those principles yourself? In the end, what I'm really looking for is a platform that allows me to talk to people - people I already know, people I don't know but with whom I share common interests - about the things that are going on in my business, technology, and my life. That sounds like a blog to me.

A blog does everything I need in this situation. A blog, whether by it's very nature or through the lens of what blog culture has become, usually represents the thoughts and opinions of one person or party. A blog is ideal for showing a progression of thought over time, a feature that closely mirrors the sort of progressive learning experience I'm expecting in making this change. The style of writing used by most blogs tends to be more conversational and less formal; it reads like it was written for people rather than consumers. Blogs encourage the reader to participate in a conversation, but even passive readers get something out of it. A lot of blogging software has tons of helpful features baked right in: tagging, syndication, trackbacks, and so on.

In large part, this has been a question of self-realization and self-clarification on my part with respect to my relationship with this business, and I feel like I've finally resolved it. Things may change in the future, and I may decide to adopt some corporate identity, staff up, and so on. For right now though, simplicity suits me, and a solution that gives me a platform to speak and expound and think out loud seems like just what's needed.