Hello, World

It seems only natural that a software developer would begin with “Hello, World”.

Before we begin, I’ll start by letting you in on a secret. I have somewhere in the region of five thousand blog posts quietly stored away in a digital shoe-box, in a dark corner of the internet. The blog posts have been written over the last 18 years — charting the inconsequential and mundane experiences of a fairly normal life that I can’t imagine anybody in their right mind would want to read.

I started writing before “blogging” became a thing. I created my own blogging platform, released it as open source, and quite accidentally experienced my fifteen minutes of fame. Thankfully a nice chap called Matt Mullenweg appeared, and WordPress happened — meaning I could dump my solution and use his. This made several people very angry.

These days I tend to spend my time keeping the “social internet” at arms length — watching, reading, smiling, frowning, and trying not to react to the hordes of trolls spouting political hyperbole and inflammatory idiocy. Instead of engaging, I quietly publish my words, and move on without telling anybody. While this might sound like a colossal failure of self promotion, it means people tend to leave me alone. This is a good thing.

So why am I posting this to Medium?

In the “real world” (a questionable concept that a good friend will debate endlessly with me), I am a software developer. This means I spend the majority of my waking hours learning platforms, systems, programming languages, methodologies, and whatever else sufficiently well to bend them to my will.

It turns out the ability to connect dots, use digital sticky tape, and lash together improbable online contraptions is a somewhat sought-after skill-set — enough that “the man” (read: sales) would like me to start writing about things that are worth knowing — or at least, things that I consider worth knowing. In return a few of my words will be chosen to unleash on an unsuspecting world.

I’m not sure how often I will write, what I might choose to write about, or how insightful or important my words might be. Given that technology and the internet evolve so quickly, perhaps it’s worth remembering what Norah Ephron wrote about blogging, to re-assure myself from time to time :

one of the most delicious things about the profoundly parasitical world of blogs is that you don’t have to have anything much to say. Or you just have to have a little tiny thing to say. You just might want to say hello. I’m here. And by the way. On the other hand. Nevertheless. Did you see this? Whatever. A blog is sort of like an exhale. What you hope is that whatever you’re saying is true for about as long as you’re saying it. Even if it’s not much.

Originally posted at jonbeckett.com