Moments of Enlightenment

As this blog evolves, I’ve been debating what type of blog it should be.  One of my primary goals is to help support the developer community here in the north east.  To that end, I’ll be posting about local user group meetings, code camps, Microsoft events, and even some non-Microsoft events that are relevant to developers. 

Outside of that, I’ve wondered whether I should use my blog to link to lots of stuff out there that people probably already have a means to find and that possibly have been blogged about ad-nauseum elsewhere?  Isn’t that what an aggregator is for?  Or should I only post original content, such as when I do a whitepaper on X, Y, or Z? 

Being a blog reader for quite some time, I’ve always thought the first type of blog is just a sell out.  Original content is king.  Of course, original content would require a dedication of much more time to my blog if that’s all I ever posted.  The reality would be that my blog would then likely go stale for long periods of time between ‘original’ posts.

On the other hand, I thought to myself… there is always that moment of enlightenment when I come across some little “nugget” that saves me a ton of time and makes my day job easier.  If someone who reads my blog hasn’t come across this “nugget” before, I could be the one that turns them on to it.  When I post about these types of things, I may be adding to the noise on the blogosphere about it, but it will raise the profile of the “nugget” even more, and therefore make it more likely that I’ll help save some other Joe a lot of work.  That’s one more way I can help support the developer community.

Yesterday was one of those moments of enlightenment.  Over the course of the last year, I’ve spent a lot of time coaching customers on how to do unit testing and use mock objects to simulate dependencies.  Mock objects are great, but they sure can be tedious to write.  Well, when reading the article about the custom EntLib blocks, I saw that the author also wrote about a tool called NMock.  I read that article, and then…  Wow!  I said, “If only I knew about this a year ago!” 

Well, that about settles the debate for me.  As the bits + bytes flow from this relatively new blog of mine, there will be “moments of enlightenment” shared with all. 

See the next post for more about yesterday’s “moment of enlightenment”.