First post at new blog

I’ve retired multiple blogs in the past, but it’s nice to be back and finally writing something again.  The desire to resume blogging relates to my desire to pursue new directions in my programming career.

I’ve earned my keep for several years using Microsoft-only products, yet for the past three years the contagious excitement of the open-source community has infected me.  It was about that time that I started using Linux exclusively at home.  Wanting to tinker and dig deep, I actually started with Linux from Scratch.   At first it seems like a ridiculous project, since you begin by simply copying, pasting and running the commands they give you to setup the chroot environment, build the tool chain, etc.  But of course the point is to do a little research and learn about the commands and what they’re doing.

Like most people, I didn’t stay with Linux from Scratch (I think I built X and then decided that was good enough.)  I wanted to continue tinkering, but not quite to that extreme, so I moved on to Gentoo.  Gentoo ran my home desktop for at least a full year.  You would think that if I stuck by it so long then I would also be willing to recommend it.  But it was a love-hate relationship and I’m 100% certain that I will never return to it.  Gentoo certainly is a tinkerer’s distribution and I learned a lot about Linux while using it.  But unfortunately the tinkering usually has a negative source — the failure of one of the Gentoo “ebuilds” — and therefore you tend not to feel too happy while tinkering with Gentoo.

The quick and ambitious nature of the Ubuntu project eliminated a lot of the reasons for sticking with Gentoo.  People liked Gentoo because they could get fresher builds of popular packages than they would have gotten from binary distributions like Fedora or Debian.  But Ubuntu pushed pretty hard and fast and started getting newer stuff into their releases faster than most other distributions had traditionally done.  So I gave Ubuntu a shot, and for about two years it has been my home desktop.

Having settled on a distribution, I began messing around with deeper stuff like programming in Linux.  It was fun working through the GNU C samples in the free book Advanced Linux Programming.  It was fun leveraging my MSFT-centric knowledge when playing with the mono project, including getting my one really, really, really tiny patch committed to Banshee (ah, what a big moment that was).  But it has been very fun getting to know Python and Django.

And with that remark I can finally return to the original point: my desire to begin blogging is related to my desire to re-focus my career in a direction which, I hope, includes open-source languages and frameworks like Python and Django.  I no longer wish to just play with open-source at night; I would rather it turn into my bread-and-butter.  For that to happen, I need to focus on these technologies more consistently.  Knowing that a blog is there waiting for me to put my learning experiences “on paper” will help me achieve that focus.

And so here I am, blogging again.

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