Let's try this again

Not too long ago, Steve Yegge made a lot of headlines for his little platforms rant. A rant that was only meant to be internally visible on Google+. It was good reading, but not what I want to talk about. Steve Yegge had kind of gone of the radar for a while since getting more and more busy at Google, but he's a really smart guy and has had a lot to say in the past(and he has plenty of haters too of course).

He once said "you should write blogs". Practice writing. Use writing to form your thoughts. I felt that he was more or less on the spot about that. Programming and system development are complex subjects. To be able to write succinctly about them is a valuable skill that will be appreciated as much, if not more, than programming ability.

So after my last couple of false starts, I'm doing this again. And I'm just going to use it as a platform to mull over things. Some entries may stay unpublished a while, others may go over large edits after publishing.

There are a lot of things I want to write about, many of them that have gotten a fair bit of coverage before and are still problems. Hopefully they will provide me with enlightenment, and perhaps someone else will get something out of my ravings. Perhaps not. Among others, subjects I hope to take a poke at are:

• Programming/software development in Japan. There are some unique anti-patterns that happen here, and many aspects of the industry have their own quirks. Some better, some worse.
• Education after education. So, for many people this is just a non sequitur. I fall into the camp of people that feels like other professions that any serious software developer should be taking and given time in which to keep their skills up to scratch and modern. More so, people need to be aware of their shortcomings and work hard to improve them.
• Recruitment and interviewing. Another one of those huge problems in the IT industry. Good people are really hard to find, they rarely enter the job pool in an open way, and it is also really hard to figure out if someone is good or not. In addition good people also tend to leave companies as they pass their value apex. There is nothing more important to a company than the people working there and the people that you can attract.
• I'll likely write about some programming stuff too. I'm starting a new job at a research position in January so should get to work on some pretty cool stuff, and can hopefully talk about it.

I intend to write this without watering down my opinions. This industry is still very young compared to others, and there is still a lot of broken stuff going on in it. Hopefully I won't just be preaching to the choir.