Why I don't write a technical blog any more
For many years I wrote two blogs on the internetone where I recorded life the universe and everything (read: hopes, dreams, idiotic thoughts, daily life, etc), and the other where I recorded bits and pieces of source code, or meandering think pieces about technology, the internet, the future, and so on. I guess you might term them “the life blog”, and “the nerd blog”.
If you've been following my writing for the past year or sohowever unlikelyyou will have noticed that I stopped writing about the nerdy stuff. I stopped sharing code. I stopped pontificating about the lower level machinery of the internet. There are good reasons for it.
I'm going to start with the more controversial reasonintellectual property. I work as a “professional software and web developer” for a solution developer. We work on all sorts of projects for clients, most of which sit behind corporate firewalls, with source code owned by the customer. Sharing fragments of code entails extra work abstracting it, which might often introduce errors that would only mislead anybody reading it. Quite often the code is sufficiently complex that it cannot be abstractedit cannot be easily shared without essentially giving the whole thing away. Not a good idea when somebody has paid for it.
The bigger reasona far more challenging reason than ownershipis the shelf life of source codeespecially with regard to HTML, CSS, Javascript, or anything else related to web development. The evolution of Javascript frameworks over the last few yearsboth server and client sidehas been stunning. The rate of change also means that investing effort in documenting discoveries, interesting methods, or solutions to common problems becomes increasingly futile. The shelf life of the published content is becoming shorter and shorter.
A good example might be the Ember Javascript project. Ember is perhaps one of the better Javascript frameworks you might use to help accelerate the development of a web application. You only have to look at the Ember “Starter Kit” and “CLI” projects for a direct example of the pace of development on the web.The Drupal project provides a much more obvious example. Drupal is perhaps the most powerful and flexible open source web content management system on the weband has recently given birth to “Drupal 8”. The magnitude of change between Drupal 7 and 8 is such that none of the old documentation, books, guides, plugins, or videos really apply any more.
Wordpress is about to experience a similar shift. The WordPress interface is shifting to a pure client/server model, through the “Calypso” projectwhich makes nearly all plugins related to the administration interface obsolete.
Change is good. The continuing development of the internet, the web, mobile, and the architectures, languages, and software we use to interact with it are a wonderful example of evolution. I can't help feeling that trying to document such a fast moving target is increasingly futileat least in terms of traditional conceptions of published content.
How do we educate developers coming up when college courses will be hopelessly obsolete before students even begin them? Perhaps it's a good thingperhaps being unable to teach a particular platform, or a particular language forces the teaching of more abstract subjectsa return to computer science -algorithms, number processes. Not such a bad thing at all.
So yesthat's why I don't share chunks of source code or even thoughts about new technology on the blog any more. It's the same reason I have kept books on the shelf at home about the people that invented the internet, but sold all the books about C, and Pascal. The human story will always be interestingthe rest, not so much.