I wish I had been blogging when blogging first really crossed my radar. Since I wasn’t, my mental record is kind of fuzzy.
The first time I mentioned “blog” in an email was on April 27, 2002 in a note to my Dad:
some things that seem to be popping up a lot in my online surfing:
web logs (blogs)
http://www.blogger.com/
(obviously this online journaling has been around for a while, but it was never the kind of thing that interested me. however, it seems that in the last year and a half or so, this service has become increasing [sic] popular.)
What were the other things I told him were “popping up”? Google’s web APIs and Mozilla RC1.
I had just graduated from UNC that May and was experiencing what felt like my first sustained break from school in 17 years (at least until I started grad school that fall). I had also just moved into my first apartment, and I was adjusting to working full time without any classes as a distraction.
In the midst of all this, my sleep schedule started slipping. I’d go to bed later, wake up later, and eventually one night I was having trouble getting to sleep at all. To entertain myself, I thought I’d see how hard it’d be to create one of these newfangled blogs (which I was still eyeing skeptically). This was before the advent of blogspot, so it took a little trial and error to get the FTP settings right. And a little longer to create a sufficiently minimalistic theme:
Thus justinsomnia 1.0 was born.
Looking ahead
Little did I know how that moment would influence the direction of my future career. When Terrie interviewed me for a job in March 2005 at ETech, she said they wanted someone who knew about the web and RSS. I said, “I have a blog,” and they hired me. Over the past year I’ve spent most of my time at O’Reilly working on improving their syndication feeds and blogging platform.
But then a few months ago I could sense that I needed a new challenge, and I just didn’t see that happening where I was, so I started poking around to see what else in the area was available. On a whim I decided to look through the new 37signals Job Board, and I stumbled across a posting for a php developer position located in the North Bay. Fast forward one month…
One of their core values is that a happy blogger is a lucrative one, so in addition to helping FM build out their platform, I’ll be helping support their bloggers—which happens to be one of my favorite things. I’m really looking forward to the change. Wish me luck.
Recently there was some chatter in the blogosphere on something called the broken windows theory from Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point. All of a sudden everyone was all “broken windows this” and “broken windows that” and I was like, “broken windows what?” So I turned to my trusty Wikipedia and discovered an entry on Fixing Broken Windows. The article describes a theory from a book of the same title based on an article from the Atlantic Monthly in the early 80s. The following excerpt explains the gist:
A successful strategy for preventing vandalism is to fix the problems when they are small. Repair the broken windows within a short time, say, a day or a week, and the tendency is that vandals are much less likely to break more windows or do further damage. Clean up the sidewalk every day, and the tendency is for litter not to accumulate (or for the rate of littering to be much less). Problems do not escalate and thus respectable residents do not flee a neighborhood.
I thought to myself, “Hmm. I like this theory. Whether or not it’s true in some kind of empirical way, I think it’s a good way to live. A personal ethic, if you will.” So I linked to the Wikipedia article on my blog and went about my business.
Until a friend replied with a link to an article on Ward Cunningham’s patterns in software development wiki called FixBrokenWindows. The wiki page relates this sociological concept to programming and computer systems—which caused this catchy metaphor to creep through my consciousness. What they had to say on the matter I found very compelling, and perhaps more importantly, I found it to be immediately applicable in my daily work, and I’m probably not alone.
Here’s a choice excerpt:
Context: Software seems to be subject to entropy. Things that used to work stop working. Ideas that seemed good at the time, seem poor 3 months later. Interfaces get ugly. It’s easy to find yourself surrounded by code that has niggling things wrong with it, or that’s just plain bad.
The problem: When you’re surrounded by ugly things, your attitude and outlook change. You become pessimistic, and your expectations are lowered. Soon you start accepting that “that’s just how things are.” You start producing ugly things yourself.
Therefore: Don’t live with broken windows. Fix things when you see them. Refactor when you can. If you can’t make the change right then, put some kind of flag in place (like a FixmeComment) to at least acknowledge that you’ve recognized a problem, and to tell people that someone cares and is on top of it. Stop rot while it’s isolated.
The Flipside: People respect well maintained things. Beautifully restored vintage cars are treated with reverence. People take off their shoes when entering well-cared for houses. A good way to get other developers to treat your systems with respect is to keep it looking cared-for.
This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.
Next week I’ll be starting a new job in Sausalito as an Author Services Engineer at Federated Media Publishing, John Battelle‘s blog advertising company. FM Publishing provides advertising for a number of highly regarded blogs and community sites, including Boing Boing, Digg, Dooce, Fark, 43 Folders, Metafilter, PVRblog, and TechCrunch, just to name a few. 
