Am I "Enjoying the Journey"?

Personal Blogs: a mixture of a personal diary, opinion posts and research links.

I've often heard the advice that all developers should write a blog. Jeff Atwood calls it sharpening the saw. Hey, I'm a massive "7 habits" fan, so what on earth am I doing here?

I started this blog over 8 years ago. I just read the first post - back then I thought my career was heading towards project management. I was working at a fairly large company and learning about leading small teams. I loved it there, but it didn't work out there. I made a lot of good friends that I still keep in touch with, but there's been a few twists and turns since then. I still think I started the blog with the right attitude though - "a little to say and a lot to learn..."

The title of my blog says, "enjoying the journey", but I've never really kept up any form of discipline with regards to this blog. I have enjoyed the journey, but this blog doesn't have a lot to show for it.

Now I do believe there is great benefit to be had in documenting one's work,  ideas and even some personal stuff. I've read where, in order to blog successfully you need a strict plan, a timetable for blogging. I'm not sure that's what I want though. I'm not trying to build an audience. I'm trying to clarify and record.

One other major inhibiting factor, and possibly excuse, for my lack of blogging and the tumbleweeds scattered around my site, is the fact that in my mind, I'm just a "Winforms developer". I've found myself back at a small, software vendor (the very definition of the term Micro-ISV) who is still desperately playing catch up in a technical sense, in a market which, thankfully, isn't demanding cutting edge, high-tech solutions in the line of business software...yet. Our software product is a line of business application that includes accounting and is marketed to very small businesses. In general they want a product, that comes on a disk that they can touch and feel, with a manual or two, and that they can install on a PC in their office.

The product we currently sell (and maintain for an annual fee) is written in VB6. For the last 3 years, I've dedicated around 75% of my time to a complete rebuild of the system on the .Net platform.  The redevelopment started about 2 years before that to be honest, but never got any traction until about 3 years ago. Now, when you say that out loud, it sound ludicrous. But when you live it, every day, for some reason, it doesn't feel like a death march project. I am rebuilding, from scratch a system that was built over three or four years, by a team of three or four developers, on my own and I'm really close to finishing. I have a detailed development and implementation plan for these final stages - much more detailed than the broad brush strokes of a plan I've been working towards until now. I am accountable to the owner of the company and we're all on the same page as to why this is needed. Essentially the product badly needed re-architecting, in order for us to be able to start thinking about web based solutions for our customers and of course now, mobile device apps. This massive project, is the enabler for all this - it's future proofing us.

Back to my point about this blog - my feeling has always been, what value could I possibly add to the Internet, by blogging about my WinForms work?  Once this product is released, it's still going to be about 8 years behind the times. That's about how old the VB6 app was, when I started this.

But now I'm looking at things a bit differently. If I'm going to catch up again, if I'm going to expose myself to the world of web and mobile development (I have done a little of that in the past by the way) I'm going to need to put some "skin in the game" - to get a bit accountable, to myself and to the general public. This blog can achieve that.

There is another side to this too - while I love to listen to and read the likes of Hanselman, Atwood, Spolsky, Godin etc, it's quite a high standard that they set. There is quite possibly a large, probably silent, majority out there in a very similar situation to myself. Maybe, in addition to gaining all the aforementioned benefits of documenting the journey, the lessons, the opinions (as they form) and so on, just maybe, I may even add a little value to the Internet somehow after all.

So bring in on blogosphere. Start teaching me your lessons.