Fashionably late...

Working on the web is a funny business. There’s no textbook that tells you how it all works, and there’s no handbook that says how it should be done. A book could never dream of covering all the possibilities and permutations of the web in one place. Even if it could, it would be well past it’s best-before date before you could get your hands on it. So geeks (like me) learn by looking at what other geeks have done – we google, we read forums and mailing lists and blogs – then we start hacking.

Sooner or later, you know your floats from your functions and your controllers from your content. Maybe some other geek would find the helper you just wrote handy – helpful, even. But you’re not an expert, not an authority – nobody, really. What’s the point of keeping a blog, or publishing your handy-work? After all, you just read some blogs and hacked away at things.

Doubts like those have kept me from sharing, but I’d like to change that. I work at a small company, and I’m lucky to be a generalist. I know a little about a lot. I can contribute bits and pieces that connect the things I’ve learned from other folks. They’re not perfect or ground-breaking, but maybe they can start a conversation. Maybe someone else can use them, hack them and remix them, and teach me more too.