Unrepentant Metapost
Long time no post. As freeing as constraints are, I think I’ve been putting a few bogus constraints on myself that’ve kept me from writing here lately.
With apologies to Jeff Atwood, I’m going to call this the Coding Horror Trap. For all of Jeff’s regular self-deprecation, he consistently writes in the voice of authority. Almost any given post of his has a point to make, something Jeff wants to tell you about How Things Are in the world of building software. Most of the highly-read software bloggers write this way- Jeff’s just the easiest to pick on.
It should be said that there’s nothing wrong with this style of writing! Putting your cherished opinions out in public for criticism can be a great tool to force you to elucidate what you believe in the first place. Some of the biggest personal revelations I’ve had were while having to defend my own poorly thought-out opinions.
But. I’m now realizing that I’d began feeling that if I was going to write about software, by golly I better have some real insight to share. And that’s patently not true. A shell trick I discovered while munging log files is just as worth setting down as anything else. So too are unanswered questions and uncertainties.
I don’t have to pretend to be some great authority on what I’m writing about. And that’s freeing.
Posted: March 20th, 2009 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 1
Comments
Comment from Jo
Time: March 21, 2009, 6:11 pm
I absolutely agree. I went to a panel on blogging last week, and listening to all the things these successful food bloggers said you “have” to do made me think: my blog sucks. But then someone said that it doesn’t matter: if you just want to write about coding tricks (in your case) or what you had for dinner (in mine), there’s not a thing wrong with that. You won’t become rich and famous, but as long as you’re writing about what you care about, that’s cool.
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