Writing and Sharing

September 12, 2014

Intent

When I created this site, I did so with the intent of regularly posting about development and learning related topics. But that hasn’t happened. Not because I haven’t been writing about them, but because I haven’t been willing to actually put them up. To post them.

Over the past month I’ve come to realize how difficult it is, for me anyway, to write for public consumption. As I’ve pointed out a couple times now, I write a lot. Every day. So this realization has come as something of a shock. But given my situation, it probably shouldn’t have.

Aspiration

My goal, what I hope to accomplish in the next six months to a year, is to learn enough about the development process to secure an apprenticeship or similar position. I understand, to a certain extent, what that requires and how challenging such a transition will be. Getting to where I’m at now has been a struggle. It’s required a lot of time, energy, and sustained effort on my part and will undoubtedly require more.

But what if it’s not enough? What if I never get the chance? What if, in spite of my best intentions, I’m not able to make it? That something I did or said or wrote prevented me from achieving my goal.

What then?

Realization

I think it’s easy to slip into a pattern like this, especially when the stakes are high or you’re under a lot of pressure. Thankfully, after thinking about it, talking about it, I realized what had been holding me back, why I hadn’t been willing to post what I’d written.

Put simply, I was worried. I was worried about who might stumble upon the site and read what I wrote. I was worried about what they might think and the conclusions they might draw. What they might decide about me and my abilities, about what I know, how I learn, what I’m capable of and so on. I was worried that somehow, simply writing about my experiences, sharing what I was learning, articulating problems and their potential solutions, might reduce my chance of ever finding a job. Which, when framed like that, sounds a bit ridiculous. Mainly because, at the root of it all, potential employment isn’t the reason I write and certainly shouldn’t keep me from posting the results.

Resolution

Moving forward, I’ll be pushing out some of the material that I’ve produced over the past month. I have about half a dozen secret Gists that, with a little editing, would be worth sharing. I also have a lengthy post that covers different aspects of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTTP, such as the request response cycle, the methods involved, URL and query parameters and so on. While a bit long in its current state, I think it could easily be broken up into smaller, more manageable chunks. Doing so would also allow me to expand on, write more about the individual topics. We’ll see.

So that’s the plan. I’m excited and looking forward to posting and sharing more material.