Saturday 19 September 2015

This blog has become a bit flat

G'day:
I got this observation via email the other day:

Checked on your blog today for the first in awhile.

Your recent articles, read to me, as you fumbling around (lil rugby pun intended). I do still appreciate you being an honest ass and admitting when you are wrong.

More then fumbling with Adobe, I can see you fumbling with Javascript remapping and to your own admission, you need to rethink notions about functions.

[...]

I think you could be doing for more constructive blogging instead of poking the bears at ColdFusion... But I don't have a blog, what would I know.

The elided bit is because this was from Acker, and he's banging on about Node,js again. FFS.

But pillorying Acker is not the the point of this article.

Acker is right.

Things here have got quite stale, and a few of my recent articles have been a bit lightweight, and... well... ultimately wrong-headed.

There's two considerations here. I am literal about the "log" part of "blog". This thing logs what I'm doing when it comes to CFML, PHP, JS, [whatever other language I choose to look at], and - for the next six weeks - rugby. I don't claim to be an expert in anything I write about, and all I'm writing about is what I'm currently doing. I know a lot about CFML and I am still on the periphery of that community, and it's what I know best, so there's a bunch of CFML here. On the other hand my day job does not involve CFML - and hasn't for the best part of a year now... my last line of production CFML code would have been at least six months ago - it's all PHP and (client-side) JavaScript.

My issue is that I am not an expert in either PHP or JavaScript, so my articles there are always gonna be a bit hesitant and "this is what I'm trying", not "this is what you should try". In the process I've probably written more about Silex than most other people have, but it's all exploration, rather than incisive knowledge on the topic. I think I understand TDD more than most people do (that's damning me with faint praise, btw), but I've written about that now, so that topic has dried up.

Another issue is that I sometimes just stop caring about investing time in exploring more technology. Most of my "this is what I tried in Ruby", "this is how Python does something" articles are because I just go "hmmm... let's have a look". I'm just not in that mood at the moment. I am fairly open about the fact I don't like PHP as a language, and so I'm loath to write about it (although I have some Silex / Symfony stuff up my sleeve). And in my spare time I am reading novels or listening to podcasts (Im currently listening to a podcast that is reading and annotating the bible to me, of all things. I recommend it not non-believers and - especially - believers alike) and re-playing Skyrim, rather than investigating Clojure or more JavaScript or [whatever].

I had a hiccup with Adobe last week, but - hey - most of my goes at them have been well-grounded, but I needed to be wrong about something eventually ;-)

Anyway, sorry if my writing is shit at the moment. But... well... [shrug]. Don't read it them ;-). I'm sure it'll bounce back at some point. A bit sure. Well: whatever.

And now France v Italy is about to start. What's gonna happen in this game, after the last upset? VIA ITALIA (sorry Aurel, and Jerome, and my other French mates).

Righto.

--
Adam