Blogging the mundane

Published on 2020-11-3

I was having a chat with a few friends over a glass or two of whisky the other evening (over Google Hangouts or whatever it is called these days) and the subject turned to whether any of us had become lazy about our online output as time had gone on and as we were getting old. (All of us really).

"Why don't you blog any more?"

My own personal answer is quite simply that I don't think anybody actually cares about anything I do these days, a vanishingly small number of people want to hear about anything to do with Erlang, an even smaller number of people have any interest in Purescript and the intersection of those two subjects doesn't do very much to increase the number of people willing to click a link with any of this content behind it. It's somewhat disheartening to write pages upon pages of documentation that nobody is going to care about until it's gotten so stale it's now useless. (See also: The Purerl Cookbook).

Conversations with folk at conferences on these subjects doesn't do much to boost my interest in sharing, you can literally see people glaze over the moment you mention anything that isn't

Outside of that, anything I might do tends to be pretty niche, have a high ramp-up cost (for me) and be quite specific to my day to day job of moving bytes from one place to another with some sort of transform in the way making the whole process a lot slower than it could be (Yes, that's literally all of our jobs).

Once I have invested days learning about something new (to me) I seldom feel the inclination of trying to write about it - even if I found it a challenge to learn myself in the first place because

A challenge then

Ignoring all of the above, I'll try to (between now and the end of the year) blog about some of the day to day mundane things "wot I have done", even if the only person it helps is me in a year's time when I open code long since untouched and can't remember how any of it works. In the absence of conferences (these online replacements don't count because they don't have beanbags to chat to people on) this will perhaps be half a replacement for that experience (In that I get to talk, but not to listen, unless somebody wants to tweet me something interesting in response).

Have at you - the next blog post(s) will be about NVIDIA GPU based transcoding and such cos I recently wrote a driver for our own proprietary workflows to integrate with the GPU on my laptop and the documentation wasn't great but the results were pretty nifty indeed.

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