Josh Haberman

Welcome to my new blog. By the way, you suck. (I just figured I had to live up to my blog’s new title).

Here’s the deal: several times before I’ve started technology-related blog-like things. They’ve always sputtered because I didn’t know exactly how to use them. Most recently, I wrote this blog, which failed mainly because I tried to make the entries comprehensive technical discussions. Bad idea. Trying to batch up thoughts until they are definitive is sure way to write a blog that’s never updated. And the entries you do write are too dense and boring to be blog entries.

Then a few weeks ago I saw Andy Hunt speak. Most of his talk wasn’t that interesting to me, but he had one tip that I think will seriously change the way I work, and that was to have a personal wiki. How blindingly obvious in retrospect: ideas and designs that evolve and are added to over time should live in a rapidly editable document system! Blog entries were pretty much the worst possible vehicle for them.

So now I have a wiki (looks pretty bare, doesn’t it? well if you have any MediaWiki skillz you’ll see that’s not the case), and all the crap I was trying to stuff in my blog can go there, leaving my blog completely available for the time-honored art of…

ranting!

Ok, so there’s this weird duality about me. When it comes to working with people, I am extremely friendly and respectful. I don’t like to offend people or say bad things about people, because it’s counter-productive. But! When it comes to technology I get really opinionated and outspoken, and ranting about technology is fun. So that’s what I intend to do here.

For an example of the kind of ranting I like to do, check out my last two advogato diary entries which are pretty good rants about why terminal emulation sucks.

Basically this blog is like Slashdot comments, except I get to choose the subject matter, and I can delete your posts if I don’t like them instead of mocking them in a reply. Just kidding.

My current state in life

In two weeks I’m starting a new job at BillMonk.com. What’s especially cool about the arrangement is that I’m working four days a week, leaving the fifth for personal, open-source projects. I have ridiculous ambitions for what I’ll be working on for my 20% time, and I’ll definitely write about those ideas sometimes. As a preview: one of those projects is an OS. I’m serious.