In one form or another, this blog has existed since 2003. On the eve of 2013, however, I find I’ve not really been using much for a few years now. Much of the reason for my recent silence is pretty simple: I’ve been really busy, and my life has been in flux the last few years.
A few years ago, I was a graduate student in sociology with hopes of an academic career. Now I’ve got a PhD in sociology but I’m knee deep in a young career not as an academic, but as a web developer. I’m quite happy with how this has turned out actually, but it’s also meant a hectic few years of playing catch up. I’ve always used this blog as a knowledge dump for whatever I’ve been learning, but I’ve done virtually none of this in recent years. I’m going to try to change this.
These days I’m writing a lot of Python and building websites and web apps with the Django web framework. I’ve been lucky enough to work at small companies where I’ve gotten a chance to work at pretty much every level of the development stack, from setting up servers to writing both back- and front-end code. And I’m a compulsive note taker, so I’ve actually been writing a lot of stuff down to help me learn throughout this process.
Why haven’t I been sharing it? Aside from just being busy, I’ve hesitated writing too many programming-related things in recent years for a number of other reasons. First, these posts get dated fast. A lot of my posts on this blog from a couple years ago were about how to do certain things with WordPress. Well, options and best practices change. I think if you want to be involved in things at the tutorial level, it’s probably more productive to help write documentation for an open source project or to participate in IRC or in local user’s groups. Then there’s a fact immediately apparent from reading any of the comments on Hacker News: programmers are not often the nicest critics, and it just takes a certain level of energy to throw yourself out there as a target to that crowd.
Nonetheless, I’ve been feeling the itch to start writing stuff here again. It’s been bugging me that my website doesn’t reflect what I do much anymore. Plus I’ve got a nice list of Python-related posts that I’d like to get around to writing somewhere. Might as well be here.
This blog is now running on Pelican, which is technically the fifth blogging platform it’s lived on: iBlog (!), Blogger, WordPress, Jekyll, now Pelican. (Jekyll and Pelican are practically identical, but I wanted a Python-based static site generator instead of Jekyll’s Ruby and switching was easy.)