Yes I know it’s boring to blog about blogging. Forgive me.

I started writing this blog as a way to document my “journey” through software development. Intended partly as a reminder to myself and partly as a source of hopefully helpful information to others, I’m pleased overall with how it’s gone.

But I’ve run across an interesting benefit I never thought I’d encounter. Occasionally, as I research and write posts, often based on what I’m interacting with at work, I find that a post doesn’t “feel right”. It can be overly difficult to explain, or not fit with much that I see on the internet already. I’m tempted to think I’m “innovative”, but the reality is worse: whatever the topic is, I’m typically doing it wrong.

So how is that a benefit? One of the themes from the movie Meet the Robinsons is that failure can be a good thing – if you learn from your mistakes. And believe me, I learn from my mistakes (I have to, I make too many of them to keep making the same ones twice).

I stayed up tonight until 3 AM (not unusual for me, unfortunately) doing some research and writing a post about localizing windows forms. And at nearly the end of it all, I realized that the real problem wasn’t what I thought it was, it was just a symptom. The real problem was more of an application architecture issue. But I never would’ve realized that if I hadn’t sat down and put my thoughts on “paper”, letting larger concepts soak in and speak to my problem as I mulled it over and explained it to someone else (You).

So – if you don’t blog, start! You never know what benefit it’s going to bring. At least exercise your brain by writing down the things you’re working through, even if you never “publish” it. But we’ll all be worse off if you keep it to yourself.

As for my post-gone-bad, I’m going to continue with my thoughts, as they might be applicable in some way to somebody, but I’m going to finish with a description of why my solution shouldn’t be necessary in a solid application architecture.

1. » Daily Bits - January 8, 2008 Alvin Ashcraft’s Daily Geek Bits: Daily links plus random ramblings about development, gadgets and raising rugrats. Says:
   January 8th, 2008 at 9:33 am

   [...] On Blogging [...]

2. Windows Forms Globalization - Aaron Lerch Says:
   January 8th, 2008 at 11:52 pm

   [...] own UI language until I noticed the auto generated “Culture” property on the Resources class. And it took me embarrassingly long to find it. Hopefully this post keeps somebody else from wasting an evening, or [...]