I’m going to start blogging more. I know I’ve said that before, so take it for what it’s worth. I think there is value in blogging. I’ve been thinking about my life a lot lately, trying to find what makes me tick. One of those things that gets me excited is programming. I started thinking about that and remembered this meme that had passed around the blog world a few years back. It was a list of questions related to how you got started programming. I remember it especially because I remember reading MarkD’s version and thinking how similar it was to my own beginnings. Then, because I love going off on tangents, I googled for ‘How I got started in programming’ to read other responses. Many of the posts I found were on abandoned blogs. And now, for the ‘causal relationship not supported by data’ statement. This is because of Facebook and Twitter. OK, maybe it’s just the natural decay of blogs. But I am concerned about the fact that most people write in forums that are controlled by other people rather in their own forum. That was one of the cool promises of the web. A little place of your own that you controlled. Facebook and Twitter and Google+ are all cool services, but the more time I spend on them, the less time I spend here. I’m sure other people have written about this with more eloquence than I could, but the bottom line is that I want to keep writing. I want to learn more about myself, I want to teach others what little I know, and I want to learn from others. I’ve been journalling a lot lately and that has been useful, but the act of hitting ‘publish’ will make my writing better. That’s what this blog is for and I’m going to start using it again.

Maybe one of these days, I’ll even put up my own answers to ‘How I Got Started in Programming’, but in the meantime, go read MarkD’s