Better to keep your mouth shut....

Mark Twain once said, "Better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid, than to open it and remove all doubt".  I have been hesitant to write a technical blog or release an open-source project for fear of looking stupid.  After all, potential employers could one day look at my blog and think, "good lord, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about".

I have to admit that my blogs are more like breadcrumbs than anything else.  If someone happens to learn from my mistakes, more the better.  I don't consider myself a particularly good software engineer.  I know many people who can come up with nicer algorithms, can code faster, and code more elegantly than I.  What I do have however that is better than your average programmer (with just  bachelors degree) is curiousity and a willingness to communicate.

I have met some very smart people who lack curiousity.  Once they know a way to solve something, they are done.  I've never understood that.  To me, discovery never ends.  Because things always change, our understanding always has to change.  I have also met brilliant engineers who are, to put it bluntly nice real world examples of the stereotypical anti-social (or non-social) engineer.  It's amazing how few engineers will say what's truly on their mind to management.  Or how little two different groups (say between Test and Development) will talk to each other.  While many engineers may come up with faster, more elegant or less buggy solutions than I do, I somehow often seem to be the one that Management comes up to, even when there are more senior engineers around.  And these managers aren't always your PHB type, they are often technical themselves.

Since I enjoy learning, and I'm not afraid to speak my mind (even when I am wrong, though I try to warn people when I am not sure of my answer), I thought it was high time to make a technical blog.  Engineers care about two things: correctness and practicality.  They are not moved by pretty talk, appeals to emotion or power, or many other things that non-engineers or non-scientists care about.  If your help isn't correct, and it's not pragmatic, a technical person will tune you out.

So although my solutions here may not be perfect, I hope readers will understand that this blog is less about giving answers as it is about asking questions.  That's another area I have noted I am better than average at.  I remember a quote from Pablo Picasso.  He said:

Computers are worthless.  All they can do is give you answers.

A good teacher doesn't just help a student arrive at a way to solve a problem, but he also stokes the fires of curiousity.  Since I am a curious person, I hope that rubs off on others, even if my blog posts reveal that I DONT know how to solve a problem.