Intrusion - This required an adjustment!

I figured I needed to explain my intrusion on the web via blogs. Most people have done this, and now I am no exception.

For several years now I have looked sideways on my colleagues who have blogged. I vowed at one point I would never blog. This is mostly in-part because I saw blogging as a mechanism to 'big-note' one-self and tell anyone - who happened to be interested - how wonderful they were and 'look at me, aren't I great'! Fortunately most of these 'induhviduals' are no longer around in my world, so the hatered has subsided somewhat - I must be getting soft.

So, what has changed my mind, why am I blogging now?

I am not sure at present I am just experimenting with it.

The Ponder...

I think the driver at present is the work I am involved in and by nature the fact that as MS consultants we work very much in isolation, so we don't often get a chance to have intelligent conversation with our peers, except in the brief moments of a coffee break, or between emails, or in the car on the way to a customer engagement meeting. I feel its necessary to at least discuss semantics, aesthetics, philosophy and all that good stuff that men need in a healthy work life balance. It prevents you getting locked-in to a particular thought or problem.

The work I am involved in is an interesting combination. On the one hand, my official job is to solve partners and customers issues, sometimes in fire-fighting mode - solving specific technical issues, sometimes more proactive - helping them through solution design from concept through to construction and test. Our official role is very broad in fact, anything and everything to do with software development. Most of us are generalists in most areas and specialists in a few areas. My specific area is AI Product Development, and I generalise in software development and most of our server products. Which brings me to my other side of work. I design and build tools and frameworks for developers. This work is basically what I do in my spare office time when I am not engaged with customers. In my spare home time' I skydive, that's another story and not to be discussed here.

At present I am developing the second phase of a enterprise level application & service framework which I am aiming to release to the development community as a premier tool for building line or business services and applications. Its primarily because of this work, I feel I need to start blog.

The framework is at a point of initial momentum building and I hope that within the next 6-12 months it will have blossomed into a major strategic offering for the patterns & practises team here in MS.

So that's the start of it. I re-wrote and re-thought this several times, before I got over myself and decided to start blogging, sorry for the intrusion...