So I guess anybody who still reads this blog is wondering what the hell is up with me lately. Where's the political writing that most of you have come to expect from me? And what the hell is up with these software-oriented tips I've been dishing out? Good question.
The short answer is that I've been too busy to blog on political matters, but that's not the complete answer. True, over the past month and a half I've been working from home on freelance projects that have taken a lot of my time. I've even enjoyed the experience of being completely absorbed by my work, harkening back to those brief instances in the employed world when the 9-5 work day shot by because I was working so intently on the task at hand.
Obviously, a lot of my recent programming-oriented blogging comes from my focus on work lately. As a developer, I have two main challenges: (1) architectural / design issues, and (2) troubleshooting issues. The former is a new challenge for me, as I've usually worked as a junior developer under a more senior architect in the past. I'm learning so much by being thrown into that world, and I hope to get to a point soon where I feel I have something to say about it. But the latter aspect - having to debug code or figure out why a certain syntax doesn't work - is more overwhelming to most people who have coding experience, and I'm no exception. In the past I have been positively arrested by the sense of futility and negative feedback that these kinds of obstacles generate.
Over the past month and a half I've gained a new confidence in my ability to see a task through and solve problems that would have previously overwhelmed me. The attitude change and confidence boost I've experienced over the past few months has been immensely rewarding. Blogging and reading and searching blogs has provided more answers to my questions and solutions to my problems than any other single source. Blogs have made my success as a freelancer possible because they are almost a form of spontaneous documentation and bug reporting that I can google through when I encounter problems. Because the online community has been so instrumental to my success, I feel it is only right that I blog about solutions I discover so that others can find it. Accordingly, I've been trying to give back by writing up short articles, especially when I find a undocumented or underdocumented solution to a common problem.
In addition to my concentration on programming, I've simply stopped reading my blog feeds for the past month and a half. I subscribe to over a hundred of them, and once I fell behind in managing them they piled up into a towering monolith of information. I probably need to wipe the slate clean and just start over.
Because I haven't been reading my usual blogs consistently, I just haven't been thinking about the kinds of ideas that usually drive writing on this blog. It is clearer to me than ever that the highest aspiration of the blogger is not to simply state one's opinion so much as it is to foster conversation. I've felt this way for a while, but abstaining from the conversation has clarified how vital it is that we keep talking and engaging each other - and ourselves - in the world of ideas.
This hiatus from politics has not annihilated my beliefs and principles whatsoever - but it has orphaned them somewhat, as the continuous exploration and critical thinking that previously informed them has been neglected. I have all these opinions without any real ability to articulate why I believe them - at least, I can't summon that kind of intellectual background easily anymore. And after only 1.5 months! This is distressing to me, and I take it as a sign that maybe I need to reestablish a balance between my technical interests and my philosophical interests.
Blogging for me has always been first and foremost about making my own thinking clearer. This can and should apply to the technical just as much as to the political, as writing about programming issues reinforces my own understanding of the problem domain. And I love the idea of having a blog that tackles a variety of issues. Now it's time to strike a new balance in my life, rediscovering my political passion while continuing to work on being a better coder. The wonderful thing is that the community exists to support both endeavors, and that I can be a full member (not just a consumer) in both.
The internet rocks.
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