You’re a decade too late

So it’s 2015 and I’m starting a blog ? Have I just awakened from a long slumber ? Have I been frozen on the long trip to a Black Hole just beyond Saturn ? No.

I’ve deliberated for a long time about starting a blog and more than a few things have stopped me in the past. It’s probably overkill to go into all of them and I’m sure in the fullness of time most of the reasons will out themselves through my writings here.

One of the main reasons I’ve never went down this route in the past is that to be completely honest I wasn’t sure I had anything to say that anyone would listen/read. I take part in lots of, ahem, “spirited discussions” in my day job and sometimes people listen, sometimes not.

I also haven’t started any kind of blog on my own as my company has it’s own blogging infrastructure which are allowed access to. I’ve written a few articles (like this one “Cloud Control to Major Tom”) that have been posted there but each time I’ve used it I found the technology underpinning the platform too restrictive. The content editor is poor, it’s got some really annoying restrictions around image sizes, formats, etc so it seemed timely to look into using a plaform that would be more flexible to give me choices about how best to communicate my thinking/opinions/advice. In any event I went down the hosting route and I may well go through that in some more detail in a future post as I learn from it.

I also wanted to potentially venture outside discussion topics that centred around my day job. Whilst it’s my intent to have a large portion of what’s appearing here centred around Oracle’s technology I also have other interests beyond that. Pegging my presence on the Oracle blogging platform wouldn’t allow the same freedom to go ‘off topic’ in the same way.

“I could just use Twitter to push stuff out there” – true and I do use Twitter in some limited form. I’ve watched other members of the Oracle community use Twitter to great effect and I’m a bit in awe. If you want to see how it’s done well tag along and view the feeds from @DBAKevlar, @SharmanPete and @CourtneyLlamas. They’re great examples of how to use Twitter to great effect supporting the Oracle community. I’ve got two reasons to extend my writing onto a blog and not simply confining myself to using Twitter.

If you’ve made it this far down the page you’re already aware of one of them – I find it really hard to get what I’m thinking into 140 characters. Twitter’s good at that, I’m not. The other reason is also more selfish. I’m pretty poor at writing and I’ve always figured that the best way to improve it was to do more of it. What better way to attempt to force myself to get better at something than to do it in public ? So, I figured the process of going through blogging may hopefully assist me in becoming better at writing.

If you’ve made it this far down, well done you 😜 I appreciate the visit and sticking with the verbosity.