noted on Wed, 30 Jul 2003
Orientation, or "What is my angle?"
By trade, I’m a web developer. I’m probably an atypical one, as I graduated from the University of Waterloo with a BA in Fine Arts, approached the web as a designer, then decided that the server was where the real action was happening. That was 4 years ago. Since then, I’ve continued to perfect my HTML/JavaScript/CSS craft even while teaching myself Unix, and scripting with Perl and Ruby. Having just completed a program for Software Professionals at UW, I’m finally beginning, in an official capacity, to transition into doing server-side development.
Why is that atypical? Well, from where I sit, I see more people transition from being programmers to web developers than the other way around. Your experience, of course, may be different.
But I am passionate about great design, and great pieces of software that happen to be based on good ol’ http. And I’m passionate about these things because I think communication is really important - important enough that any barriers should be broken down as much as possible.
So I’m attracted to ideas like blogging, RSS, the Semantic Web, ways of simplifying the markup of text... in short, ways of sharing information.
But I like to think I’m a pretty pragmatic guy, too. Yeah, the semantic web is cool, and I think that we’ll have something like it someday, but it’s going to take a lot of grunt work by highly-trained people to get the value out of it. And I think that cost is too high right now. But that, as they say, is another blog.
I like to play a lot too. So I’m sure you’ll see quite a bit about the games I like. It’ll cover some PS2, and it’ll also cover the slowly-but-surely emerging world of abstract games. Chess variants need not apply. PC games need not either.
One thing I’m going to try with this blog that I think would be unique is to post links to stuff I found interesting fairly quickly, which in itself isn’t that interesting, but then, when I have a few moments later on (for values of “later” being ‘that night’ to weeks from now), I’ll follow it up with a longer entry explaining why I think it matters. I haven’t seen anyone else do it that way before, which really isn’t saying much, but I hope it makes for an interesting mix of different kinds of content for you.
By the way: Blosxom Rules. Thought you should know.
see ya,
-rh