Hopefully this is the start of something new that I can also sustain. I have an idea I would like to explore, and I have decided to try to record my progress in this blog. The idea is to do with creating my own software product company which I will call ALSL. I currently have a day job so this blog will be a record of the ideas I have about delivering a software product, rather than about actually delivering it. I plan to explore how modern software is delivered and apply what I learn to some hands-on experiments, so there will be definitely be links to code. My goal with this blog is to aggregate some knowledge that might be useful to me or somebody else trying to develop an idea into working software.
First a little about me. I am a lurker on blogs and social media and have been since around 2002 or 2003. Even before that I ran my own private Slash blog where I wrote notes on my hobby of configuring Debian Potato and Woody systems to dual-boot on my parent's computer. A move to Canada in 2005 inspired me to attempt to keep in touch with far away friends and family by creating a personal blog. Procreation of the Wicked as it came to be known was a personal blog about adjusting to life in Canada along with some of my thoughts on various popular culture and what might loosely be termed reviews of Metal gigs I went to. I found that this kind of blogging isn't really my strength. It isn't about length or the effort required to maintain a blog - I am equally bad at updating statuses on Facebook or tweeting and retweeting anything though I do spend lots of time reading tweets and blogs.
I am inspired to start blogging again not by my desire to communicate personal details about my life but more by an interest in emulating some bloggers I admire. First among these is Scott Hanselman. In particular my blogging is inspired by a couple of his posts:
Those posts make an argument I find compelling for blogging over, for example, retweeting links I find interesting or links that help me fulfill my ultimate goal, which is to develop an idea into working software. The extra comments I add to those links and the reasons I give for supporting the ideas of one post over another are the reason I am doing this, and that cannot be done effectively in 140 characters. I also agree with arguments about the open web and the ability to link to blog posts, and the importance of owning my content.
My previous blogging attempts are contained in backups of Slash and Wordpress databases, making the content somewhat difficult to get at. For this new blog I have initially chosen to go with Jekyll and host it in Github Pages. I already have a Github account that I am going to be using a lot in upcoming posts, and Jekyll looks both simple enough to get working immediately and powerful enough to offer any features I think I might need in the immediate future. The content and indeed the whole site will now be stored in source control and cloned to the one or two computers I use to edit this blog, which is a vast improvement over database backups. In addition, this solution meets one of the first principles I am going to use when choosing tools for my fictional company ALSL, which is that it is inexpensive (free except for the domain registration which is optional anyway).
The next post will contain more details about the blogging platform and also some details about how I am going to try to organize the work that needs to get done for ALSL.