First post

Wow, first (and possibly last, I'm pretty lazy...) post. This is exciting.....

Ok, this is the most selfish reason ever to create a blog. I'm not one of these guys that wants to give something back to society through the medium of blogging or anything. Nuts to that. This is all about me!

So, first the back story, and then I'll let you in on the secret of the blog (or you could just read the "About me" part on the right, but that would spoil everything...)

I've been programming for a while, I did electronic engineering in college, so did bits of C and Java there (and some other stuff of course, but this is about programming). Anyway I didn't really feel like I'd had my fill of college after the degree and so I went on to do a PhD. Doing a PhD was great, I'd recommend it to anyone with an interest in research.

However, in terms of learning to program, academia is not the place to be, at least in the area that I did my PhD (digital video analysis). I mean, I did a lot of programming (mostly in a hybrid of C and C++), but you only ever do enough to get the job done. In research, all you ever want to do is prove an idea works. In general it doesn't matter if it works efficiently or not, as long as it works. So you get a good idea of how to solve problems etc. but it is usually in a "I'll fiddle around with this until it works" kind of way. If it crashes every second time who cares? If it is the single most inefficient thing ever created, well, what's the problem with that?

Even in the processor intensive area of digital video analysis, where you are often processing gigabytes of data, it largely doesn't matter how long the processing takes. Program running slow?? It doesn't matter, just leave it running overnight. It's 3 in the afternoon for God's sakes, there are bars to go to. Just leave the program going and you can get back to it tomorrow.

And therein lies the problem. For, I have now ventured into the real world of software creation. And what a big bad world it is!!

I must admit, when I decided to leave academia I kinda thought "I'll show these corporate whores a thing or two". Well, I may have been wrong on that one.... In the first couple of months of 'real work', the main thing I've learned is that I actually know very little about programming.

So, as for the secret of this blog. Well, as I said, this is a selfish blog. I aim to chronicle my journey from a basic programmer to (hopefully) an accomplished one. Whenever I find out something that I didn't know before, I'll post something up here for everyone to marvel at how silly I am for not knowing it in the first place. Thus, the basic aim of this blog is to re-enforce my own learning.

It won't be pretty, but it might be useful (for me)....