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Comment ça va? Why I Blog and how you can tell me I'm wrong

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Why why why Delilah Dave

There are 2 main reasons why I started this blog. One of the reasons is so that I can contribute to the wider tech community, and hopefully give something back to all of the blogs with invaluable information that helped me during my time as a student and now continue to do so into my professional career.

Thats not to say my blog contains invaluable information, maybe one day it will, but through my career thus far I have stumbled across many a blog which have helped me with a neich problem, or just a Getting Started guide that matched my exact situation. Without those blogs I wouldn't have learnt as much as I have done and I would like to hopefully provide a resource that helps someone out even just a small amount.

The sheer nature of the profession that we work in requires us all to continuiously learn and grow, be that through personal projects in our own time, or through on the job learning. Both are very valid learning environments, and there is no right or wrong way to learn. I personally enjoy learning through developing my own personal projects in my spare time, so that I can have complete freedom on what I learn and what I make as a project. I learn through doing. Which brings me onto the second, and arguably main, reason why I started this blog.

I blog for myself

Thats it. No one else.

The above point of contributing to the teach community is a great by-product, however the main reason why I blog is so that I can solidify my understanding of a particular thing. It also gives me a clear target of where I want to get with a project.

I have started many projects which have achieved the bare minimum I wanted from them, but are not in a state where I can share them. Now there is nothing wrong with that per-se. If the project has achieved what I wanted to achieve from it, then that is awesome. However it would be even better if I was able to take it just that little bit further and present it to the world. This blog gives me the platform where I can do that; I can work on personal projects to help me learn, have a goal of the project being presentable to the world, and also share something that will hopefully help someone else someday.

I don't think I had fully, consciouslly, realised this until I read the following tweet by Scott Hanselman.

Within that Twitter conversation are some interesting comments, and a follow up by Scott regarding blogging something which is wrong specifically peaked my interest

This is very valid and one thing that is a concern of mine. I take the effort to ensure that I am not blogging misinformation, however this blog is a platform for me to learn so there is inevitably going to be people out there who have way more knowledge about specific things than I do. There is a chance that I could be wrong, despite my best efforts. The above Tweet from Scott got me thinking, I don't have any way of soliciting feedback. If I am wrong then there is a limited (if any) way people can get in touch with me to inform me of my mistake and allow me to correct said mistake.

This is not good. It is not good for me in my ambition to learn, and it is not good for the wider community as I'll be spreading misinformation to the 0 people that read what I have to say.

Introducting Comments!

What better way to solicit feedback then to allow for comments on the blog? As such now at the bottom of each of the posts (including historic ones) there is a Disqus panel for readers to leave comments. Now I don't necessarially expect anyone to comment, but the point is there is the option to leave a comment should someone wish to.

The setup for this was incredibly trivial. You can see my change in this commit where all I needed to do was setup Jekyll with the disqus shortname defined in the registration steps of Disqus.

That was it. Now all 0 of you are at liberty to leave a comment...

Enjoy!