Finally, my own blog

I've been wanting to start my own blog and web site for some time now. While the web site is still a work in progress I thought that the end of Spring term at university was as good a time as ever to get things going.

For the last six months or so I keep coming across various articles and ideas and I say to myself "oh I should really blog about this." Call me a hopeless dreamer but I truly believe that one person can make a difference in the world and I won't stop until I've made my dent. I may only be a 21 year old student but I am very opinionated. At the same time there are several people that I admire, a few of them being: John Gruber over at Daring Fireball, Joel Spolsky from Joel on Software, Bob Cringely who writes the I, Cringely column, and Bill Cowan a professor at the University of Waterloo, who I've been doing research with and doesn't keep as much of an online presence. The main reason I admire these people is because they all have strong opinions that are very well reasoned about yet expressed with a simplicity and elegance that few people are able to match. Talk is cheap and dreaming without action would truly prove to be hopeless. If I do really hope to make a difference in this world I have to learn to express myself with as much eloquence as the best of them.

As they say, practice makes perfect and what better place to practice and get feedback than on a blog.

So, why Blogger? I must admit that I am somewhat of a perfectionist; that combined with how much work they love to give us at university has led to me putting off creating my own blog. Blogger has everything I need for the time being and by the time I need more features I can either migrate my blog to some custom solution or who knows Blogger might have the features I need by then. At this point I think that getting into the rhythm of blogging regularly is the most important part of the whole process. This kind of thinking goes hand with an approach to technology development that I have been pondering about for a little time now; the most effortless solution often tends to be the best one. For a perfectionist it can be hard to let go of the notion that solutions must be rigorous and completely defined over the problem domain. Sometimes the quick and dirty solution can turn out to be even more enabling; it can turn out to be exquisite.