Proud to present my new blog

Why a new blog?

Well, the layout of my previous blog was ready for some revision. Apart from that, thought it was, for various reasons, just time for a fresh new start.

Why a new blogging platform?

Indeed, you might have noticed that I moved from WordPress to Ghost. I hope you like the layout. The main reason is not that WordPress is bad, but it’s more that I don’t want to invest in learning php, for which I feel kind of natural aversion and which I would need for fine-tuning the theme or building my own. Since Ghost is built with NodeJs, I’m starting to become Ghost’s best friend. I’m self hosting the blog on an Ubuntu server and that has been, so far, a very pleasant activity. The more, this new experience will be definitely a source of a lot of new articles.

My blogging adventures so far

What’s the best way to learn new things and maintain documentation and ‘learning notes’? The answer is simple: start a blog. It’s in the first place your own ‘collective memory’. Obviously, I could simply do the same in OneNote, but when making a write-up for a blog, you just do that extra effort which makes the difference. Secondly, it’s a good check about your own knowledge or put it other words:

So far, I have written 128 articles (on blog.pragmaswitch.com). The vast majority of articles on this blog was about LightSwitch, a great tool for building cost-effective line of business applications. In retrospect, not all articles had the same level of quality, but the fact that some of these articles where apparently quite useful for readers was for me a great source of happiness. In the future I’ll try to favor quality above quantity and I will cover definitely a broader range of subjects (NodeJs, Angular, MeteorJs, …).

What will happen with pragmaswitch.com?

Obviously I won’t throw away the content since it is visited really quite intensively. The pragmaswitch blog will currently just stay where it is, but I will definitely move the platform also to my Ubuntu server. Maybe one day I will integrate the posts in OpinionatedApps.

What are opinionated applications?

The tile of my previous blog, PragmaSwitch, didn’t have any real meaning except maybe the allusion to ‘being able to write applications with LightSwitch in a pragmatic way’. While setting up my own private business and getting older and getting less preoccupied with inventing pedantic blog titles, I got inspired by the work of 37Signals and their notion of ‘Opinionated Software’. More about this later.

Who’s that duck?

I don’t know her personally it’s just a pic I took years ago in an animal park here in Belgium. I hope she’s doing well and I promise her to never write about duck typing :) Cheers. -paul.