Writer's block
I don't know what to write... to write is to create though. So let's create:
I've been busy for the last 2 years. Busy with work and busy living. Life always takes you to different places, and for me this was Zurich (from Munich) and Google (from university). Both changes were not that big and yet quite big. They have taken me far away from where I imagined myself to be in this moment of time 2.5 years ago. I was at a loss of words about this for long, but I think I'm finding my voice again. My life at Google is worth a series of articles at a later time, and Zurich is a whole different story with very little Computer Science in my spare time.
So let's go back to the topic: writer's block. How to overcome it? In a way, I have run out of creative steam during my master thesis, and even though I am busy at Google, it's a different kind of business to work in a big company and be told what to do. Definitely more boring than university usually :) In a way, my writer's block, which has kept this blog on hold for the last 24 months, has also been a creator's block. I have resolved to change this with a willingness to forego some sleep in the months to come and show more discipline and restraint in my outgoing nature ;)
My writer's block in the last year is also a consequence of my reluctance to produce content for the WordPress platform I'm using, which has proven quite painful to maintain over time. The plugins and hand-written glue that keeps some of the blog together is not holding as well as it used to anymore, and I'm not able to fix all the issues in my spare time.
It's more fun to create than to maintain in general.
In this spirit, I want to come up with a new blog platform to run this blog on. Assuming that everything around is not fitting my peculiar taste, I will have to come up with something new from old parts. A Frankensteinian blogging system. My main idea is to actually use unit-testing and regression testing on the components and content of the blog to identify issues and maintain a consistent quality overall. In particular, content should stay static and not break in unexpected ways when adding new content that is intended to be orthogonal.