Hello World!

Here we are, at the birth of a new blog. I'm not quite sure what to say at this point, besides welcome.

This isn't the first time I've started a new blog. It likely won't be the last. I've been more or less "blogging" for several years now, at different sites under different titles. A majority of this time was spent on my previous blog, the now deprecated WildWeazel.net, which itself underwent many transitions along the way.

Over time I've struggled to pin down exactly what I wanted out of an online presence. I'd like to think that it is because I feel that I have something to say, which other people will find interesting. Much of it has simply been driven by a desire, almost an obligation, to be a part of the interactive, self-publishing community that has sprung up around web technologies.

I've found myself at times falling into the bad habit of making it more about the blog itself than about blogging. I'm a software developer with an interest in usability, so the temptation to mess with code and try new designs and features has sometimes taken precedence over writing interesting posts. I let myself forget that the first "feature" of a good website is content. Sometimes I feel like I need a blog to play with, and another blog to, well, blog with.

Again, I feel the need to step back and reconsider what I'm doing here. This is not just a continuation of my previous blog. Were that the case, I would have just redesigned the theme, written up another self-motivating post, and allowed the domain to renew for another year. But in reflection I felt that I had reached a point where WildWeazel was no longer in line with what I wanted to put into and get out of a personal blog. It was too cluttered, too distracted.

So this is another one of those transitions. The timing was mostly arbitrary- it just so happened that my old domain was expiring just as I felt the itch to start something fresh- but there is an element of symbolism to it. I've recently graduated from college with my master's degree and started working as a professional, so I am in fact leaving one stage of my life behind and entering another. You could say that WildWeazel symbolizes my college years, as the use of that name nicely coincided with them, and that I am now putting that name aside and starting fresh (though I continue to use it as my nickname in gaming contexts, as anyone coming from CivFanatics will recognize).

And so, in brief, that is why I have started this blog. I chose the name Debugging Life because it has a nice double meaning. In one sense, it describes what I do. I'm a software engineer, and a lot of my work involves debugging- finding and removing problems in the software. Thus, this is the life of a debugger. In a larger sense, it describes my motivation for blogging in the first place: to explore the issues that I face in my life, and hopefully provide some insight along the way. I suppose then that this blog will tend to be split between two general topics: observations on software engineering, and thoughts on life in general, with a dose of nerdy perspective spilling into the latter.

My motivations for this blog are not ambitious. I have no aspirations of being the talk of the software community. Nor do I feel that I am particularly insightful on other topics. I doubt that I have much to say that can't be found in countless other tech blogs and/or personal pages. My posts are mostly a creative outlet for my own amusement, and occasionally I find that there are others out there who share my interests and enjoy my writing. If you are one of those people, welcome.