This is the… fourth?… time I’ve started a blog, and I have become exceedingly efficient at it.

Well no that’s a lie. Every time I do it I overthink it a bit more.

So why am I doing it again?

Who are you?

Yeah that would be a place to start. I’m David, I’m a parent, and a software engineer, and various other things that I could go on about but that’s where the list drifts from “this is part of my identity” to “this is stuff I do on occasion”.

At the time of writing I’m in the final couple of weeks at my current job and about a month away from starting a new one. That means I’ve spent the last couple of months thinking a lot and being asked a lot about what works and what doesn’t work with this whole “making stuff out of software” malarkey, and it turns out I have a whole big disorganised pile of opinions that might be worth writing down. If only for the exercise.

Why not just social media?

Well Twitter is a smouldering pile of bad decisions, Musk fanboys and trolls; LinkedIn is people shouting buzzwords at each other; Facebook is… well, Facebook.

Mastodon? I like Mastodon in principle but something about it just doesn’t click for me. I’ll probably write more about that at some point.

But I think in general, what I want is not so much an immediate audience as just somewhere to put some thoughts, let them sit, and then maybe be able to point at them later as Opinions I’ve Expanded On Before instead of having to improv them every time I try to explain myself to someone.

That’s not really how social media works - it wants to be pithy and relevant right now. Also I’m not really doing this for an audience… I think I’m more likely to actually do something useful with this if it starts in obscurity.

Also, walled gardens and all that.

What now?

I have a couple of drafts of longer-form musings that I might try to bash into blog-post form, but in the short term I’ll probably stick to trivial posts while I figure out the mechanics of getting the website up and remember how to type in full sentences. Stay tuned.