For years, I considered blogging curious and incomprehenshible activity, something just as strange to me as rice engraving; something that I could perhaps take a mildly curious gander at, nod and produce appreciative sound or two, then move on. Oh, I had an account on Livejournal, with mandatory two entries spaced almost exactly a year apart, but that account was primarily there to access my friends’ logs, whenever they asked me to take a loook at their posts.
My approach to weblogs didn’t change much thorough that time; perhaps frequently visiting news sites built around the concept of a blog, my standoffish approach to that very idea mellowed down, but not until maybe a year ago, I would consider a personal blog something useful, both to the person owning it and general populace. That changed after I started experimenting with new, less known technologies and software at work, mostly puppet and nginx, and found out that the best documentation, best solutions to problems I have encountered, were usually found at someone’s blog.
Over last few months, I felt the growing need to start my own weblog, to both share non trivial but not earth shattering finds, in hope to make someone’s life just a little bit less busy, but also exercise my public writing a little bit. I have been resisting these urges mainly on the grounds of simple lack of material to use, topics to write; I did not want to pollute the Web with just another unmaintained blog with one post per year and ton of comment spam.
My recent experiences at work, showing the value of archiving those small, simple solutions to rarely encountered problems, combined with my growing desire to branch out to AI game programming as well as training and morale boost that studying English philology brought to me finally removed that last mental barrier.
And so, it begins, for better or worse, my foray into blogging.