Why another blog?

A Confession

I'll be honest with you, I'm not entirely sure this whole blog business is a good idea. There is a certain level of narcissism that is needed to say "the world needs to know my thoughts!" and then actually package them up to get them out there. The cynic in me has always been the stronger side of the argument and so I've gone a fair while without ever putting a blog together.

A Revelation

What finally pushed me to make one was a discussion of git rebase --onto I had with my boss. Well, it was less than a discussion and more of a him-telling-me-to-use-it-to-save-me-trouble kind of thing. Potato, tomato. After he mentioned it I scurried off to do the usual google search and sift through the first few results. Eventually I found one that made a certain amount of sense, and then I was cautiously ready to try it out on my branch.

Later my boss sent an article on the same topic to some teammates of mine that we wanted to spread the gospel to. It was the same article that had made it click for me. That moment was the "aha!" where I realized how much confidence his recommendation of the article gave me about the content.

A Problem

The problem is the flood of content available now where so little of it is valuable. Even worse is that so many of them rehash the same basic things in slightly different words. You can throw a rock and hit seventeen different Medium articles that rephrase some offical docs somewhere that congest your google search results. To be fair though, I've found plenty of good Medium articles over the years, but it can be hard to separate the wheat from the chaff (or the rice from the bran for you gluten-free folks, I think rice has bran).

A Solution

So this is ultimately about signal to noise. My main purpose with this blog is to curate some resources that have helped me. Sure I may add some of my own content if I think it's worth the digital ink, but my goal is to carve out this little space on the web where I can pass along some of the gems I've found.

"Aren't there already sites that do that?" you may ask outloud wherever you are and I won't hear it. Indeed there are sites like that, but too often I find they become overgrown with outdated content because they try too cover too much. It's early days for this endeavor, but I don't want that to happen here. I want my resources to be sparse and well groomed like a nice topiary, maybe in the shape of an animal because that would be cool.

So here we are, at the end of this post, most likely better people by virtue of our long, arduous journey through my words. Thanks for reading, and I hope you find something here worth your time.

-M