October.
October already, again. Year’s moving on fast. Looking through my history, there are few years that have seen as little activity on this blog as this one. Maybe it’s a a mix of being active in some prominent social networks as well (which ends up being a dump for a load of day-to-day snippets, links random thoughts) all along with lacking really a load of things to write about.
It’s not that life’s generally boring these days – far from that. In some ways, however, it seems difficult to actually and continuously keep on writing about things. Technology? Yes, that still is of interest as I still work in the software business and still am enthusiastic about that, however these days, with the team slowly growing bigger, I end up with less and less chances to actually do hands-on work with technology in a way worth writing about, in a way backed by experience of heavy, productive day-to-day use. These days, pretty often I rather end up evaluating technologies and trying to figure out whether they might (not) be something we should spend more time with to solve some problems. That’s interesting from a “playing-with-new-toys” point of view, but it’s also something where the level of experience gained rarely moves beyond what can be found out in reading a bunch of online tutorials and watching a handful of screencasts. All along with this, I am slowly moving into the depths(?) of Agile Development processes, especially Scrum, which is both interesting and challenging and a completely different kind of thing to do right. Maybe that’s something to be dealing with, in some aspects, later, but at the moment I hardly have anything meaningful to add to the vast amount of insights written on that by now.
Browsing my history I found myself repeatedly ranting about politics as well. I don’t really feel like doing this today, anymore. Again, I don’t feel I have much to add here, and even worse, it seems today, despite many political situations being in quite a disgusting state, there’s always someone likely to make this even worse by adding yet another unreflected, biased, hate-filled statement on whatever seems to be the culprit for whatever seems “wrong” at any given moment. I surely admire the fact that, in 2016, “publishing” (…) stuff online has grown somewhat easier compared to, say, a decade and a half ago, but somehow I also at times miss both the “filtering” effect that used to arise from requiring certain technical skills in order to do so and that kind of culture most people seemed to quietly agree on back then, talking “netiquette” and all, which doesn’t seem to matter anymore at all by now.
Images and experimental writings these days are what feels closest to me about this blog, ever since merging [[dm]] and wanderer.zimmer428.net into one; however for images it’s hard to use a blog of your own right now – compared to what most of the “specialized” networks such as Instagram, Flickr or EyeEM (my favorite these days for a bunch of reasons) provide out of the box, posting images to a custom wordpress installation especially from a mobile device is messy and no pleasant experience. Not even talking about exposure. I don’t “do” any of this (writing weblog, pushing images down arbitrary web users throats) for exposure or publicity but rather for communication and always enjoyed the kind of involvement of getting into discussions about blog entries, images, … on random web sites, but this kind of communication also more and more tends to happen elsewhere. That’s the only point that once in a while makes me wonder whether keeping a weblog installation of my own is worth the hassle. Not much to say about loads of the wanderer writings – I liked doing that, but I never was or am good at. Tough job finding a good middle ground here.
What’s left then? I’m not sure. But that’s all right. It makes things interesting again. At some point I love the “instant” notion arising from Instagram (or, at the very least, the feeling that used to be there in these networks before they ended up to a large degree being dumps for paid ads and polished stock photography as well), of people paying attention to what they see and feeling open enough to share what they see and think in such moments with a potentially global public community. Finding that same, random, “instant” thing about writing seems an interesting endeavour, yet possibly not all too easy. And maybe using whatever is possible these days with cross-posting to various networks, it still is a possibility to go beyond a mere “write-only web” and actually make this a vehicle again of getting into communication with people. Wouldn’t be all too bad.