To have my own unique place on the web to speak my mind and to reach an audience.

My own

There are plenty of places to speak your mind on the web – social networks, blogging platforms, wikis and the list goes on. The one thing a lot of people don’t realize is that most of those places control your content, your posts, your tweets.  Sure, some might do it less blatantly then others, some might say that they don’t censor and some have an export option, but the biggest problem is that more often than not they also control your audience. I’m not against such services (twitter is even starting to grow on me), but I don’t like the lack of control. I want my online persona to be under my own domain, designed (even poorly) by me and controlled by me.

Unique place

Continuing on the same note – sveder.com is unique. Not only is that my nickname for years now, but it is also a great domain name and more importantly, brand. So yeah, it will take a lot of time, content and luck for this brand to get big, but it will be more rewarding to me than having the same reputation on twitter or Google+.

Speak my mind

Doesn’t everyone want to be heard? Isn’t attention one of the most basic needs of humans? Less philosophically – I’m going to use this space to broadcast my opinions, my knowledge and my speculations. But like everything in a pragmatic mind – those might change, become more accurate and be proven wrong by reality and by the audience. Topics for this blog include computers, programming, developing, computer games, bicycles and everything else I might get interested in.

Reach an audience

The last point, but probably the most important – while I can control what I write here, no one can really control who views it, who it reaches and who has something to say back. This blog is pretty much like every other product – you put it out there and hope that it helps someone and that someone will get passionate about it enough to start a conversation.

A sign of things to come

I mentioned the general topics I will be covering so to get me a bit more committed here is a list of upcoming subjects for posts:

A series about my github projects – since they are already out there I want to have a post or two about each detailing their history, code reviewing some stuff and capturing the knowledge in them in a more googleable way.

“Practical programming” – a series about basic modern software developing concepts that are usually not taught at school. Example topics include:

• Technical debt
• Agile practices
• “There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it”
• separation between view and logic and more and MVC

I’m gonna try and have at least two posts a week.
If that sounds interesting you should subscribe using RSS and be sure to comment and talk back so that I can improve – this side of the keyboard is new to me, so let the journey begin 🙂