Wednesday 14 January 2009

Welcome

Hey there,

As a brief introduction, I'd like to explain the name of this blog so that you get some idea of what it's going to be. As the name implies, it's about programming - specifically, programming oriented around ideas.
Typically, I'll have an idea and then experiment with an implementation, exploring the idea by building code around it; by doing so, I come to better understand the vague concept that I started with and will (with any luck) have built something that I can later reuse. As my understanding grows, the implementation changes, and so the code as a whole grows quite organically, often sprouting in directions completely unrecognisable from the initial root.

Sometimes the ideas aren't mine (in which case I'll give due credit) but the implementation piques my interest. In other cases, the idea is interesting but the implementation is impractical - hopefully here I'll inspire someone else to pick up where I left off.

In any case, often as not, trying to explain this haphazard sequence of thoughts and code-revisions is difficult. You start at the beginning and have to meander through all the following changes before you finally reach the current state of a project, by which point you've likely lost the listener (if not yourself) along the way. Trying to write a document or comments which explain what's going on is even worse, at least for me, because I can't write documents. Just can't. Write code, yes; write English, no. So instead, I'm going to make notes as I go, put them in this blog and add links to relevant code (which I'm currently storing on my CodePlex account) and we'll take this crazy journey together.

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