About HtaS

Honest to a Segfault is the personal web log of Christopher D. Leary.

License

All web log entries, unless otherwise noted, are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Feel free to contact me about exceptions.

Affiliate links

Proceeds from affiliate links are being donated to top-rated charities through GiveWell (which is itself a 501(c)(3) public charity) at the time of this writing.

Writing philosophy

The published entries in this blog track my evolution, in the worse is better sense. I'm wrong about things sometimes. I write about what I think that I know in order to, through exploration and explanation, come to know it better.

When writing gets embroiled in anticipation — responding to arguments that haven't been made, avoiding touching on the bits of information that you do know for fear of the related bits that you don't, avoiding discussion of anything that's temporally sensitive — I claim that you severely limit yourself and your ability to convey interesting and meaningful information to others. You know how it is... haters gonna hate.

In the end, I'm pretty sure this is more fun, anyway: write colloquially, break your comfort zone, let readers go on the journey with you. We're all in the same process of learning from a position of information overload, so I'm going to bet that the notion of handing down venerable lessons with infallible reasoning, essay after essay, is severely antiquated.

I also believe that doing a deeper dive on background information is helpful for roping in people with higher interest-to-experience ratios. I imagine that getting those passionate people talking to you and thinking about ideas with you can be even more important than getting potentially crufty, set-in-their-ways experts. [*]

Naming

I changed the name of this blog from VaporWarning to Honest to a Segfault in July 2010 with a brief explanation in the prefix of the entry Virtues of Extreme Programming practices, which I'll repeat here:

I've changed the name of my blog to reflect a new writing approach. I've found, with good consistency, that being near-pathologically honest and forward is a boon to my learning productivity. Sometimes it causes temporary setbacks (embarrassment, remorse) when I step into areas that I don't fully understand, but the increased rate of progress is worthwhile.

Writing influences

It's fun to note blog writers that have influenced the way I do blogging.

  • Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants (by Steve Yegge) got me significantly more interested in language design and implementation. For any entry on a topic that I cared about, I never tl;dr'd. There were always fascinating nuggets of thought processes or references to things I'd never heard of before buried in those thousands of words — I would come back to read an entry piecemeal for any number of days that I had to.
    I took that reading experience to heart. I don't mind writing long entries. I'm pretty sure that the core audience you're writing for will always finish wanting more, so long as your discussions are cogent and thought-provoking.

  • Kathy Sierra's book series and the few blog entries that I've read I have found to be spot-on. Using over-the-top ridiculousness, colloquial writing style, and a solid variety of media to get people to feel something about what they're reading totally appeals to me. Plus, following her advice I get to try to be funny.

  • Seth Godin's ability to write few paragraphs on a daily basis that effectively make your mind churn has always amazed me. It's a beautiful reminder that you can be very concise and still make people think.

  • Joel on Software (by Joel Spolsky) I admire for its accessibility. The anecdotes do suck you in, and the fact that his audience is pretty well established as the "nondescript-but-passionate programmer" makes his writing fairly level-headed and relatable. In the end, Joel has introduced a lot of concepts to a lot of programmers, and I think that's an admirable metric.

Another thing that I found very profound was a tweet by Michael Easter:

I once wanted to write like Bruce Eckel. Then, Dave Thomas. Now, I want to write like Michael Nygard, a rare tech writer who can make me LOL

Contact info

Here's a little joke program that provides a way to contact me:

#!/usr/bin/env python

"""Be ridiculous."""

import imp
import re
import sys


def path_hook(f):
    sys.path_hooks.append(f)


@path_hook
class Zen:

    name = 'this'
    multi_str_re = re.compile('""".+"""', re.DOTALL)
    me = 'puevfgbcure.yrnel@pbearyy.rqh'

    def __init__(self, fullname):
        self.source = None

    def find_module(self, fullname, path=None):
        if fullname != self.name:
            return None
        file, _, _ = imp.find_module(self.name)
        zen = file.read()
        file.close()
        self.source = self.multi_str_re.sub(repr(self.me), zen)
        return self

    def load_module(self, fullname):
        mod = sys.modules[fullname] = imp.new_module(fullname)
        mod.__loader__ = self
        exec self.source in mod.__dict__
        return mod


import this

Footnotes

[*]

In all, audience is a really tough problem for a blog, and I don't know that I always have the time or ability to address it properly.