Starting is one of the hardest things to do

2014-12-03T07:45:00Z

Just over six years ago I stopped posting regularly to my fairly long-lived blog (apparently started in April 2003), and just under four years ago I noticed it was not loading because the server it was on had broken somehow, and I didn't care enough to put it back up. (Astute readers will note how those two dates are roughly a few months in to my last two job start dates...)

I've written a number of blog posts over the last few years, but I haven't posted any of them. I don't even have most of them anymore, although a few are in the branches of git repos somewhere. I'll try dig some of them up - one of the things I enjoyed about my old blog was rereading what I was thinking about at various times in the past. (I guess I'll try get that back online.)

I've also written two different bits of blog software since then - since that's what one does whenever one contemplates starting a blog up again (although, to be fair, I also started setting up Wordpress and Tumblr blogs too).

The first used Hyde, a static blog generation tool (whose development seems to have halted a year ago). The second is what I'm using now - a collection of Flask modules and some glue code that constitutes gibe2, which I wrote just under a year ago. It uses Frozen-Flask to freeze a Flask app into an HTML tree that can be served by any static web server.

Putting something out there - let alone a first pass, a beginning with some implied commitment to continue - is quite scary. In my career, I've tended to be the joiner and sometimes the completer to a project, not the initiator. I find it easy to take something from where it is to where I think it should go, and hard to imagine what should exist.

I should mention that I have succeeded in posting a bit to play.TechGeneral.org about the occasional spurts of time I get to work on a little D language OpenGL someday-might-be-a-game. The minimum expended effort there is a lot higher - building a new feature or doing a major refactor, and then explaining it all in a post - in fact the posts are sometimes a lot harder to put together than the code, and the code is quite a bit further ahead than the posts now. It will probably be very sporadic with posts mostly coinciding with my long weekends and vacations. (And, unsurprisingly, I've just finished up a vacation where I finally got around to putting the final touches on this here blog.)

Connecting together starting up being scary and game programming: I've been watching Handmade Hero religiously since it started (the first few on Youtube the day after, the last few live). Talk about being a tough thing to contemplate starting - one hour a day of writing a game from scratch streaming to the public every weekday - every single little mistake in your code and in your explanations there for people to pick apart without any opportunity for editing. And having ~1000 streamers in your first few shows - no pressure!

That definitely put just putting together a few words a week with no implied time-bound commitment into perspective, so here we are.

I stopped reading blogs roughly when I stopped caring about mine. I hope to find a few interesting people to follow. A few of my friends used to post, albeit infrequently. I hope I can convince them to do so again as well.