I haven’t made a “real”¹ first post yet, but I have more or less settled on a design for my new, mostly technically-oriented blog. Personal-life type things will find their way in here as well, but certainly the intent is to write about development- and team-related topics. Whether good or bad, I tend to bring as many or more social and inter-personal skills to the table as I do technical ones, and I intend to talk about things such as team dynamics, communication styles, and effective relationship management techniques in the context of the ongoing march toward production.

The other item I want to note at the moment is that I haven’t remotely finished filling in the blogroll links yet. There are a ton of great developer/bloggers I’ve come in contact with or come across, and the folks currently linked to represent the links easiest at hand when I was working out the design. I’ll be continually adding links, if nothing else than to at least show my support for writers I’ve found to be good or helpful.

(And also to help me remember to go through them all regularly. Which might elicit the response, “Use the RSS Reader, Matt!”, but as someone who finds appeal in visual esthetics and envies the ability to create a good design, I’ve always been put off by using a reader other than as an actual news aggregater. And even then, I prefer to visit the source site to read an interesting article. The graphic designer for Ars Technica, for example, didn’t put multiple months into a redesign for me to just strip all the pretty out with a reader. YMMV, of course.)

Here’s hoping this is the beginning of many decent digressions into life as an upright code monkey.