A Developer's Apology

1. The joy of sharing

When I was in highschool in 90s, I had a web site. Coded and crafted by hand (and with the help of Macromedia Dreamweaver). It was functioning like a computer magazine. New articles in a timely manner. I used to research on some topic and assemble an article or translate some articles from English to Turkish (the site was in my native language).

There was an English teaching section that you can find materials to learn and practice English. I got really good feedbacks especially for this section. Even one guy said that, "I cannot afford a private teacher for my kid, but the help of your web site he learns...". That was so valuable for me to know that someone out there was benefiting what I had put there.

Coming back to today, 20 years later, I still do not have that. But not anymore, I am getting it back now.

2. Quality Issues

Often times I am worried about the quality of the content I want to publish. But hey! The entire world is not watching me and waiting to criticise what I published. Also considering the fact that I am not the best engineer in the world (not yet), it's ok to make 'some' mistakes and learn from them. Actually what we need is to make more mistakes. Like training an artificial neural network. More and different mistakes, If you know how to learn from them, is the best teacher you can ever have.

So, I will share even unfinished articles I started. Maybe this will create some motivation to finish them.

3. Admiration and feel of progress

I admire couple of people who has (or used to have) vibrant blogs.

Fatih Arslan
derin deli mavi
picostitch
ferruh mavituna

are some of them. I admire that because a vibrant blog gives you the chance to look back. Look back and see what you achieved, what you learned.

I moved from stack to stack in software development, and still doing some side projects in different technical focus areas like front-end, game-development, machine learning, programming language design and so on... So If I had kept even small posts about the topics that I worked on, I would have had lots of memories at hand. And now, like they have never existed. But no worries. I'll have them 5 years from now. And maybe even show them to my kids.

4. The Action

After I got motivated to get it all back, I thought about the fantasy to create a static site generator. How complicated it could be? To be honest, I thought I could pull that off in 10 minutes. I have a plan about creating a youtube channel and work on fun projects. But, in ten minutes. End to end. This static site generator can be one of them I thought.

Ok, I could not finish it in 10 minutes, but still, it can be done in a very short amount of time. Because I had to spend time on planning and structure of the workflow. Once you have done that, the implementation is easy.

Here is the repo for the simplest blog engine ever. 1 File static site generator This blog is created with Simbe. Write your posts with markdown, and run compile. That's it.

Other action items are: - Bring all the medium.com posts to this blog - Publish unfinished posts with [unfinished] tag. (stolen idea from picostitch) - Try blogging as much as you can!

To keep the hopes high, let's listen what Jeff Atwood says about blogging:

When people ask me for advice on blogging, I always respond with yet another form of the same advice: pick a schedule you can live with, and stick to it. Until you do that, none of the other advice I could give you will matter. I don't care if you suck at writing. I don't care if nobody reads your blog. I don't care if you have nothing interesting to say. If you can demonstrate a willingness to write, and a desire to keep continually improving your writing, you will eventually be successful. *

5. Special Thanks

The first thing which made to think to have a working blog/site again was seeing a frined created a very simplistic static site generator, and started blogging. Of course in a very professional way comparing with my humble efforts.

This is the tweet put me into action:

Finally got my own blog back up and working (again). A couple of lines of nodejs building static HTML. Do I need more?https://t.co/s0PR2KvtXc
Code at https://t.co/6sUFbGuE70 if you are curious.
Will be starting more active also on @picostitch

About #crafting (and) #JavaScript.
— Wolfram ⪡JS-- HTML++ CSS++⪢ Kriesing (@wolframkriesing) April 15, 2020