Generally, I’m not one for cliches. I’m a full-time cynic, part-time pesimist and view New Years resolutions with a generous dose of skepticism, thinking most likely these are happy lies we tell ourselves to sleep better at night, before the fade into obscurity a few weeks later. Yet here I find myself, on the second day of 2023 finally acting on a blogging idea I’ve been mulling over for a fair while now. There’s also a pragmatic element to the timing, it’s definitely easier to carve out the time to start something new while away from work for a while. But the timing is hard to ignore, perhaps it’s auspicious. Or perhaps like other resolutions this will lie forgotten in a few weeks time, only for me to hurriedly remove all evidence from the internet whenever I realise. Time will tell.

Motivations

I think when starting on a body of writing (even something as disjoint as a series of blog posts) it’s sensible to clearly lay out some intentions and purpose for the time invested. Especially in a context like this, where (hopefully) I’ll keep contributing over time, and might forget some of the original inspriation. So here’s a few things I’m hoping to achieve by writing here. Some of them are pragmatic, others are a little more open ended.

In no particular order:

  • Generate some artefacts I can refer / refer others to for setting up software / processes (and convert some of my github gists into something a little more fully fledged)
  • Document things I’ve learnt, tools I’ve tried
  • As a prompt to try out new tools/ tech I’ve heard about (like Hugo which I’d not used until setting this up)
  • Musings about software development practices, and how that fits into the world of consulting / transport modelling
  • To keep writing, as these days this is not something I do a lot in my work
  • To keep teaching, as although I no longer do any university tutoring, this is still something I’m engaged and interested in (and written form seems the most pragmatic way to apply that right now)
  • To carve out my own little corner of the internet. More on this below.

Audience

In all of this, the primary audience is intended to be me. Something I debated in starting this was whether I could just write myself some nice markdown and put it on github, self host the website only or use something like Joplin or Archivy and never reveal anything to the internet at large. Right now the key reason for sharing is convenience. I can reach this site with any computer/tablet/phone that has access to the internet. Not only that but a public webpage is distributable - I can pass a link on to anyone to view. In some sense that might limit what I would post (it certainly means I won’t be putting much personal reflection here) but on the other hand, I’m not afraid of posting on these topics either. I might not be an expert in lots of things, but I don’t claim to be one either.

Addendum

What’s in a name

Successful blogs should probably have catchy, clever names that reflect their content well. Catchy, clever names are not something I do very well. I also don’t have a well defined scope for what I want to write about. So placeholder title will suffice for now (and perhaps for longer)

Non-goals

It’s probably worth trying to declare certain things out of scope for this blog. The most obvious in my mind is delving into front end web development. Writing a blog (even as a static site, which admittedly is a lot less complication than most applications on the internet), there’s perhaps a temptation to unpack and fully understand how the markdown I’m writing here gets converted into something that looks pretty on the internet. It’s certainly something I could look into. But I only have finite time, and this blog in itself isn’t meant to be a huge time sink, and I have enough interesting things to look into in my spare time without going down the rabbit hole of learning a framework and toolchain that will be out of date within 6 months.

The other non-goal which is clear to me is to preserve a perfect historical record for the world to see (). I fully intend to go back and update posts I write with better descriptions, updated technology, corrections and elaborations. Where appropriate I’ll acknowledge that the content has changed. Bearing in mind I am my primary audience (at least for now), I want this to be something I can refer to regularly, rather than a relic of things that might have been useful once upon a time. Realistically, if this is successful, I’ll probably end up with a mix, I’d like to think that what I work on and how I accomplish things will evolve over time, which might necessitate that some things are out of date. But that’s okay too.