It’s taken me quite a while to set up a professional blog, despite the fact that creating one is extremely easy these days. It isn’t the effort, but the motivation.
There are two types of programmers in the world: starters and finishers. Your starters can’t wait for the next project, the next technology or the next brilliant idea to come along. That drive toward novelty makes them ideal designers, prototypers, and R&D staff. But please don’t bother them with details, edge cases, or error conditions. Don’t ask them to maintain a piece of code, or tune an operational system. There are always a million more interesting things to pursue!
I’m a finisher. That means the blinking prompt or the blank page terrifies me. Where a starter sees endless greenfields and boundless opportunities, I see a beautiful, elegant white starkness about to be marred by my amateur scribblings.
So I didn’t want to start a new blog. What I really wanted to do was rebuild my old blog. The one from my ill-fated attempt to start a software company during the Global Financial Crisis. There are good articles there, posts I’m proud of writing. I’m sure I could salvage those, update them, refactor them, improve them… yes, I’m a finisher all right.
But sometimes you do need to start over, let go of the baggage, and begin again.
Hello, world.
Dean Thrasher 