Why I am blogging and what about

I am happy to be blogging again!

The first challenge, of course, was to decide how to blog. There are several dimensions to this decision.

• Use blogging software or a static web site
• Use a service or self-host
• Use Wordpress, Blogger, Tumblr, etc.
• Use a managed Wordpress service
• Build upon my own CMS work
• Do something totally new

As you can see, I settled on Google Blogger. This decision was made after a few hours of contemplation and research. In the final analysis, I wanted to start writing today and not spend as much time administering my tools as writing. Blogger is backed by Google and I use a lot of other Google services. Also Blogger has some nice social media integration.

One of the things that I had wanted in a blog was to be able to author in Markdown. As I sit here typing HTML into Blogger I am reminded why that is desired. After this first entry, I will start authoring in Emacs in Markdown-mode and use tooling I already have configured in Emacs to render HTML which I will paste into Blogger.

So what are you likely to find on this blog? My current interests in software development are multi-faceted. Things I have on queue include:

Content management tools

I have been working on a CMS called ThinCMS since around 2000. Two years ago I got to spend some quality time with that code base when I rebuild the Longwood Gardens web site. Other sites still use it but it is time for a re-architecting. I have something specific in mind. Look for this as a thread of blogging activity next year.

Microsoft Power BI and Office365

A considerable fraction of my work time at ShufflePoint is being spend learning and developing for Power BI. That is the brand name that Microsoft is using for their desktop business intelligence tools which run in Excel. I am creating a suite of OData proxies to common digital measurement platforms. There will be much to share on this topic.

Computer vision with OpenCV

My daughter is participating in FIRST Girls of Steel again this year, and I am striving to make a technical contribution by assisting and mentoring the programming sub-team.

Other BI tools

As I have the opportunity to use and learn different desktop and web tools for business intelligence, I will share my insights. Some specific tools I know that I will be using and writing about include Tableau, Spotfire, and Logi. I will also be continuing a ShufflePoint project to build a special-purpose CMS for creating digital measurement web dashboards which use ShufflePoint as the data source.

Visual Studio, .NET, C#

The majority of my development is done in .NET C#. Emacs is still my IDE of choice but I am gradually learning to use Visual Studio. Some of these blog entries will probably be of the "Visual Studio for Emacs Users" variety. But I think that most of the articles will be about new/emerging .NET features such as Windows Identity Framework, MVC, WebAPI, Entity Framework, etc.

Single-board Computers

I have a couple Raspberry Pi's and an ODROID-XU. I have started to explore and experiment with "The Internet Of Things" using these boards. They are also being evaluated as platforms for robotic vision. Add to the mix my Mindstorms EV3 and there will hopefully be some smart little robots milling about.

Blog as developer diary

As a developer working on multiple projects, I maintain many project diaries. These are text or markdown files. There are literally dozens of such files that I touch every day. There are hundreds all together. There are tens of megabytes of text reflecting diary keeping over the last 20 years. I try to keep things organized, but much of what I write is of a "thread of conscience" nature. One of the reasons for my gearing up my blogging activity is that it will force me to summarize things and to capture the important essence of my development work. This will be as much a resource for me as for anyone else. Many times in the past I have searched for a solution to some problem only to find on Google something that I had written years ago (you young developers will observe this effect - if you stick with the profession long enough).