Writing to Clear the 'Idea Buffer'

This site has been live for a week now and I thought I would reflect both on my motivations for writing and intentions for the future of this blog (yes I know it's a cliche!). Firstly, my motivations for writing are selfish. The two specific interrelated problems that this blog addresses are: (1) capturing of ideas that may otherwise never see the light of day, and (2) to purge my 'idea buffer' to foster progress.

I talk a lot of crap with a lot of people (typically neighbours, colleagues, and friends), which usually results in all kinds of distilled opinions and project ideas. Sometimes those ideas are written up, and sometimes those written up ideas are acted upon. It has taken me a number of years to realise that sadly much of the specifics from interesting discussions are lost, although the useful general principles are usually recycled. Posting on ideas and distillations of conversations provides an excellent free-form documentation process, with all the great things that the medium encourages, such as cross-referencing and comment amendments. The most important feature of the medium is 'public by default', promoting sharing with interested parties, and if I'm lucky comment from a broader community. Further, from my previous blogging exercises, I have found that the converse to 'public by default', is that generally people don't care, which mitigates so called 'sensitive issues' such as priority on ideas for projects, an effect that increases with the specialty of the subject matter.

Another lesson that has taken me a long time to learn and effectively exploit, is that my 'idea buffer' is finite, and once clogged up with a few interesting observations or principles for projects, all further thinking is biased. Additional idea generation is painted by whatever is clogging the buffer (for example if I'm interested in MapReduce, then everything will look like a divide and conquer), the elaboration of ideas in the buffer is stunted, and new ideas are assessed way too aggressively. Writing obsessively purges my buffer, and as a process has treated me well with regard to base work product for my PhD dissertation.

Frankly, selfish writing sucks (blogs included)! I try to address this by setting up topics, and ruthlessly cross-referencing both previous posts and related material. I have much to learn, although it helps to have less selfish writers as role models (for example Paul, Kevin, and Jeff). I think of it in terms of a multi-objective problem (for example attributes of 'audience'), where non-dominated solutions satisfy specific sub-groups (can't please everyone).

The plan for the future is to produce original content related loosely to software engineering and artificial intelligence, and average a post per day. I have few illusions regarding the construction of a passive income stream, although I have included Amazon Associate content. I like books and I discover and buy books based the discussions and recommendations of others. Therefore, referenced books link to Amazon, and the blog includes a single banner advertisement of suggested products based on the posted content (so-called Omakase widget), that latter of which can be ignored using the excellent (and free) AdBlock Plus extension in Firefox.