Hello (again), World!
I have been... stuck... in a funk... worried... anxious... It has been particularly frustrating because I used to publish here a lot. I know how to get unstuck in code. Why is this so hard in prose?
I found one answer in a post I published all the way back in 2002—quoting an article written by my mother-in-law.
Perhaps the most insidious tyranny is the silence that occurs from caving in to the power of audience, the capitulation. — Linda Miller-Cleary. 2002.
Reading that sentence again stopped me cold. It might need a little more support from the original article to clarify audience sense and capitulation. She quoted from an interview with a high school student as concrete evidence.
...it was called The Challenge of American Citizenship.... There was no way you could tell what would be a good speech. I was thinking the normal ones would be voting and public service and all that. Voting is so obviously American citizenship that I decided to do something about citizenship and world peace, racism. It was the one time when I didn't do what I thought the judges would like. I liked it, and I didn't win. People who did win did things like voting. I wish I had won the $100. I thought the next time I wouldn't be so original. I decided to do what would win. School writing is the same basically; I write to get the grade. I just try to write what the teacher wants. And in debate, for example, I'm getting trophies, winning. It's kind of a game.
And wrapping that with a bow, she quoted Emerson:
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world...I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead-institutions.
Back when I wasn't feeling censored by my own audience sense, I published some things that in hindsight make me cringe. I wrote a whole series of posts about state machines that I now regret for plainly revealing I skipped the computer science track into the software business. No one who went through a compilers class would have bothered to write 11 or 12 posts about state machines.
I have a lot more I want to say. I've learned a lot in the past 20 years that never made it to my blog.
But the place I feel most compelled to start also feels a lot like I did when I was writing about state machines. I am stopped in my writing by my fear of the cringe I will feel someday when looking back on this new series.
Returning to lessons I learned from code. Kent Beck published "Test-Driven Development: by Example" the same month I published that blog post. See archive or O'Reilly.
Test-driven development is a way of managing fear during programming...
- Instead of being tentative, begin learning concretely as quickly as possible.
- Instead of clamming up, communicate more clearly.
- Instead of avoiding feedback, search out helpful, concrete feedback.
I take one small step. Maybe the smallest step: write a program to say "Hello, World!"
Except...
...writing code has been my primary means of procrastinating the prose... for about a decade.
If I can build some publishing momentum, there will be code included on this blog, and prose about the code. But today I'm going to prove that the code I already have still works.