Blog

Oh my God. Blog. This poor abused word.

First of all. This piece of writing? This article titled “Confusing WordPress jargon”? This is a BLOG POST. It is not a blog. Yes, this makes me all shouty. It drives me crazy when people refer to a blog post as a blog.

The web site of which this blog post is a part is a blog. A blog is a collection of blog posts. It’s a web site on which blog posts are collected. This blog / blog post issue is not specific to WordPress but I just had to get that out of the way. Oh, and blog is a shortened portmanteau of the phrase “web log”, as long as we’re discussing terminology.

Continue reading “Confusing WordPress jargon is confusing.” →

 

My son, who is four now, has been in school since he was 12 weeks old. Yes, school. Many people make the mistake of thinking that infants cannot be taught anything, but after about the first three months that’s completely untrue. In fact, they learn so much in the first twelve months of their lives it’s stunning. They learn to hold up their heads, roll over, sit, crawl, stand, and walk. They learn to talk. They learn to drink from a cup and eat with a spoon – if someone teaches them. In fact, they learn to eat food! They learn how to socialize and interact with others – if they have the chance. They begin to learn the world. They learn the sky and the grass and hugs and kisses; pants and diapers and books and toys. We are born knowing very little. It is not unreasonable to have a teacher and be with other learners at this time in life.

Continue reading “Growing as a developer” →

for the longest time i felt that my interest in web development was more about the satisfaction of making things, things i could see (and use).

i realized at some point that i was working mostly with people who were interested in solving problems. this always seemed too abstract to me – i wanted a really tangible result. i can still remember the strong sense of satisfaction i felt after marking up a simple page. i mean i have a specific memory of driving down a section of the durham freeway after work one day and feeling immense satisfaction with the marking up of a page that i had done that day. this was in the day of NCSA Mosaic so to say that it was a simple page – well, it was a very simple page.

somewhere along the way this changed. i still feel satisfied with with having made something, but it’s problem solving that truly interests me now. it’s not even having solved a problem, it’s actually the problem not yet solved that is the best.

it’s probably fortunate that i’ve evolved in this way, because i don’t get to make much visible/tangible stuff anymore, but there are really a lot of problems to solve.