For me writing is always hard. The words and sentences flow, but never in the correct order, making a terrible mish-mash of words that look like writing, but don’t read like it.

Thus I would hide behind humour. While previously I found it difficult to write, I never found it difficult to be derisive or sardonic. While it was always funny, and mostly well aimed, it was definitely a ‘literary crutch’ of sorts. It allowed me to feel comfortable and never really have to put myself out there.

That, thankfully, is starting to change. Through a few small steps I am feeling more comfortable in my skin. I am writing small book ‘reviews’, and through some erudite friends (GM & JS), I have been forced to be more careful with my writing.

One day, I will be completely uncringeworthy. Until then, enjoy the pâté.

Check out my review at http://obfuscure.com/books

Check out my review at http://obfuscure.com/books

Check out my review at http://obfuscure.com/books

Then, I^* had a brainwave – why not combine the two, blog a short review of each book you’ve read! What a wonderful idea, I thought.
So, as a consequence, http://obfuscure.com/books was born. The layout is still a work in progress, but for a start it has my first 3 books on it.

Happy reading!

* – when I say ‘I’ had a brainwave, I really meant to say I was copying Ms G’s et al idea of short book reviews

These days I never breathe, I’m always on the run. I don’t know why I’m in such a hurry to get to the ‘great gig in the sky’. I’m sure when I get there all they’ll speak to me about is money. Sad really.

Time is so fleeting, it’s a shame we are all caught up in this game of us and them.

Not to mention the apparent shared brain damage society has; individual thought is eclipsed by the desire to ‘fit in’. You should be free to be any colour you like; why must we all be shades of grey?

Where have I been? No updates since the middle of last year.  Slack eh?

Wow.

Well to be honest (and cliched) I’ve been really busy with work and life things of that nature. But all the that is about to change, new year, new content.

Now I just need some content…

One area I have been particularly lazy is my cycling. I would ride everyday of the (working) week – 300km. Hell I was impressed, even if certain people at my work weren’t.

Then tragedy struck.

I stopped riding everyday. At first it was gradual, going from 5 to 4 to 3, a tire blew and took too long to fix. Low and behold a month had gone by without sitting in the saddle. I got my bike back, but I didn’t ride. So sad

But then, all of a sudden, like a phoenix from the ashes, I was born anew. I had the fire in my belly, and the speed in my step…….

whoa! wait one minute, what sort of Danielle-Steele-over-embellished-pile-of-shit are you writing. Sorry readers, my inner pulp writer took over, and you paid the consequences.

To sum it up:

I used to ride all the time, but then I stopped. Now I have started again, and to keep the bastards (or bastard in this case, which is me) honest, I have decided to chronicle my journeys from sloth to superman. Each day (I ride), I will present my ride info in a tabulated format, so that you can keep track, and I will update the post accordingly.

Let the race begin!

I am starting a new project today, mybill, a service that will allow for bill management across space and time. It is intended as an inwards facing app (i.e. for my family), that makes it easier to manage payment of bills that are the responsibility of multiple people that don’t live together. If however it turns out to be useful to others it may find it’s way into general use.

The idea itself is not original, It has been done before, and no doubt better done before.

Why then you ask. Why go through the troubles of creating a new thing if it is already out there. Well there are a few reasons, 3 to be precise.

1. I have promised my father for far too long now that I would create something along these lines. We have a large family of moochers who are tardy when it comes to paying phone bills.
2. I don’t like any of the free alternatives out there. I know there are competitors, but I don’t have them on hand.
3. I need a project. Now I am not completely idle, I have been keeping myself busy with little bits and bobs, but I need to do something that is a concerted and focussed effort.

So now I start. Now the opening paragraph may have seemed a little superlative and hyperbolic, but I believe it to be true. With this project I am going to attempt to stop all those bad things I have done in the past. Thats right, I’m not perfect and I’m coming clean about it.

Don’t mistake me; I believe I am really good and what I am good at – PHP/HTML/Javascript development – with the following caveats:

• I am good for someone who has been doing it as long as I have (i.e. not very long); I have and will always have lots to learn to become great, too much in fact. I will forever be chasing the dream of zen like development. I know I can never be perfect, but I wish to try.
• I am good in the areas of my greatest knowledge, as previously mentioned. I am OK, average and woeful in others. As mentioned I always have more to learn, especially in my areas of weaknesses.
• I am young and inexperienced. Intelligence and intellectualism can only take me so far. The rest needs to come from life experiences and knowledge.

So with these things documented, lets move onto to what has changed, what I will change, and what I want to change. I will use my work to document the various states of change within my personal coding, because the two are inseprable. I cannot help but be influenced by what I do for eight hours a day, for the five out of seven days of the week. In turn I can not help but influence my work at which I spend so much time with things I have picked up along the way.

So what has changed?

Well work has changed somewhat. We are getting bigger, in terms of the clients we take on, the jobs we do and the future we see for the company.
Now when we started at the job Josh and I were both very green, straight out of uni. We were both naive to what it was like in the real world.
Now this in itself isn’t an issue in a conventional software company. You have higher ups who have had the naivety replaced with equal servings of cynicism and experience. They help guide and mold you (if they are good) and force you down the ‘correct’ path.
That didn’t happen at my company. We were both the most junior and senior programmers there, with nothing to guide us but the values instilled in us through university. So we more our less flew blind through the first couple of years. We read and heard people saying the way software should be made, but without someone to show us and give feedback we had no real way of telling how we were going. The boss with out any programming experience telling you you did a good job is not really sufficient.

Despite this we pushed on, and got through our early failures to implement standards; coding standard, standard frameworks. We managed to get some good products out there, if I do say so myself.

However we realise we are still deficient in certain areas. The early failings of no mentoring were never rectified. The juniors have now become seniors, and new juniors have come in, but still no programming managers have been brought in.

So what will I change

Now when I say what ‘I’ will change, I mean what the company will change about it self, and how I will in turn change the way I do things.

Now for ease of narration I will continue to use ‘I’.

‘I’ will:

• Implement a version control system that is used universally.
• Enforce minimum coding standards on all within the company.
• Insure that documentation and system information is kept so programmers can work interchangeable on each others code, with a minimum of fuss.
• Implement thorough and rigorous testing.

So what do I want to change?

To bastardise Robert Burns, “The best-laid plans of mice and men/ often go awry”, or to put it another way I want to change all the things I will change. I have worked just long enough to know that despite best intentions and promises everyone loses their passion and motivation for things that are perceived to be ‘extra’ or ‘nice to have’. People most often revert to do the bare essentials, especially when support for change is on a deadline. Despite the feeling of history repeating itself I am optimistic. For the company to grow, and for me to grow as a programmer these changes need to happen.

Only time will show whether I have gone back to old lazy habits, or taken a leaf from my own book (blog) and implemented the changes I and the company so need.

Now I am off to practice what I preach.

Now I don’t know about you, but I am a fairly modest guy, and I find it hard to write or in fact say anything too self promoting or self confident. But confidence begets confidence, so thats what I tried to do.

Type type type, type type type and voila we have an about page. Here is an excerpt:

…. By day a mild mannered web developer, by night a coding evangelist…

I followed the tried and true formula for an aspiring kick-arse-part-time-tech-writer person who is describing themselves; be a little serious, be self deprecating, be sarcastic, be funny and be an evangelist of something. I dwelt on the word evangelist and thought to myself “am I an evangelist?” and moreover “what is an evangelist?”. Everyone else appears to be an evangelist, evangelism is the term du jour for self description. Why can’t I? Now I thought might be a good time to do some research.

Now don’t take me for a fool (though many that know would say that is an apt description), I don’t go chucking words around that I don’t have at least a rudimentary understanding of. In the case however I thought I better get the dictionary definition, just to make sure I wasn’t mislabeling myself. So to borrow the definition from Merriam-Webster:

evangelist

Main Entry:
evan·ge·list
Pronunciation:
\i-ˈvan-jə-list\
Function:
noun
Date:
13th century

1: often capitalized : a writer of any of the four Gospels
2: a person who evangelizes; specifically : a Protestant minister or layman who preaches at special services
3: an enthusiastic advocate <an evangelist for physical fitness>

Now 1 and 2 are out, I have not preached in a long while, and despite my extensive writings on this blog and my years in the public school system I have yet to compose a Gospel. 3 however seemed to fit the bill, I am enthusiastic about coding, and I advocate good coding practices.
To confirm myself as a righteous evangelist I went for a tech slant via wikipedia.
What’s this?

…A technical or technology evangelist is a person who attempts to build a critical mass of support for a given technology in order to establish it as a technical standard in a market that is subject to network effects…

Doubt started to creep in. Had I made a terrible mistake labeling myself as an evangelist. Could I rightfully claim the title of evangelist? Alas, it was not to be. My conscience got the best of me. I quickly amended my about page to ‘coding enthusiast’.
Now if you are still reading at this point, you may be asking what’s the point. And I would say good point, asking what the point is….um?
The point is I would say evangelist is a label oft misplaced. You may argue it is just semantics, but without semantics the world and blog-o-sphere would be a crazy place.

Wait for the next installment to see the ‘compendium of evangelists’, maybe.