marcus welz

New Years' Resolution: Blog More

I've had a neglected blog for as long as I can remember. It's always been my intention to post something insightful about whatever it is I am doing. For some reason, though, they end up very much like most of my pet projects; I end up writing a few drafts, don't finish them (thinking I'll do that later), and two months later I have very little desire to polish and publish them. It's unfortunate, because eventually I'll read through some of those drafts and think, dang, that was pretty cool stuff, I should publish that. I will, later.

Maybe it is the perfectionist in me, but I can honestly say that publishing random thoughts out of context just isn't as appealing to me as showing off something that's been brainstormed, designed, prototyped, implemented, and gone through refactoring iterations. Unfortunately that doesn't happen often because apparently one of my congenital birth defects is the Scope Creeping Syndrome.

In some cases it's also because some of my interests are all over the place. One week I'm playing with new Zend Framework components in PHP to do Twitter Oauth, the next I'm dusting off my keyboard and try to wrap my head around Ableton Live. While doing so my mind is already all over Steering Behavior and I'm waiting for the arrival of that game programming AI book I just ordered. I've barely got the flocking behavior implemented in Erlang, and now I'm trying to visualize that in Flex using Papervision 3D. There, I stumble across shortcomings (No UDP sockets) and research RTMFP with little success after reading through bits of streaming server open source code. Where was I? Something about Twitter?

Besides, if I'm blogging about something, I'm not researching or learning anything. Not entirely true, of course, since presenting a subject requires a certain level of proficiency thereof. Otherwise I'm not just wasting my time, but yours as well.

And then there's this constant feeling of coming across as too narcissistic. "Hey, check me out, look what cool stuff I'm doing." My parents raised me to be considerate, resourceful, and humble, and to this day my pet peeve is hearing people talk about "me and you" rather than "you and me". But marketing yourself in today's social media sphere is well accepted, as long as it's done with class. It takes some effort to generate the right amount of signal tuned to your target audience instead of just noise.

And, since I'm already just ranting here, therein lies the next problem; who is my target audience? This isn't really a pure technology blog with a narrow focus. And I'm generally not too keen on pouring out my personal thoughts. But I suppose that's okay. I'll let Google sort it out.