Hello world!

Hello indeed.

In the conversations with my colleagues (and in the course of introspection) I realized that the reasons of founding this blog are somewhat fuzzy even to me. The best explanation I came up with — i.e. that it pretends to be homologous to skilful developers' blogs I regulary read — does not satisfy my inner need of exploring the heart of the matter.

So, after fair amount of rumination, I've formulated a short list of things I expect of this investment of time.

Don't get me wrong: I believe that in the field of software development you cannot assume positive expected monetary value from that sort of an investment, unless you are an evangelist or in some another way connected to the vendors of the software you write about. That's the joy, not money, you gain.

Let's face the truth — an employee of an ISV sparsely may tell a good word on the big company's proprietary product. However, there is a tendency to render a pretty positive opinion on an open source solution, where any bugs one may encounter can be fixed by patching the sources. That's not the feature nor quality, but the expectations and possibilities gap that matters. Similarly, the intention of this site is not to replace a pile of documentation written by professional technical writers. It is to present an independent view on the development process; and the knowledge not mean to be arbitrary correct, but open to correction and enhancement.

Through the previous digression I introduced maybe the main topic of this weblog's content. I owe a great debt to all the bloggers and forums' users that led me out of all these hopeless situations, when the stacktraces were dozens lines long and there was no hope. I don't know if it is hacker ethic's knowledge sharing principle, an egocentric will to show off or become influential, evolutionary-coded altruism or feel of guilty. You must go ask my psychotherapist if I'll ever get one. Only thing I know is that I want to quickly google a solution whenever I encounter a problem that's not my fault. So if the solution cannot be found — and I accidentally happen to work it out — I feel obliged to post it.

See, I don't know any country with a software industry employees union, but the profession nevertheless seems to be one of the most corporative.

Besides my findings that I hope will be helpful to the readers (and to myself as soon as I'll start to forget the stuff) I'm going to post my thoughts on books I read, talks I saw, projects worth to be promoted and so forth. Furthermore, I wish I would write something more architecture-level from time to time. That means posts without a LOC.

It would be really cool if there was any feedback, avid discussions in the comments, clever answers to the rhetorical questions I ask, gifts, money, hugs & kisses, but I don't really anticipate any of these, at least initially. I'm not really into this whole 'blogosphere' thing and have never frequently commented on blogs I read. So I won't be suprised if neither do my readers.

I think of programming as of creating aesthetically compelling structures in order to organize some segments of this chaotic matter we are struggling with. This weblog is intended to do the same with the topic of software development, where the phenomena of increasing entropy is visible as nowhere else.