home / 2015.06.25 07:30 /introduction
There was a moment when I decided to finally take the step of creating a blog, some time in the recent half a year; more likely the idea was there for a long time but I never considered it seriously. Sometimes the only step required to start something is to take seriously the possibility that something good might come out of it.
A heuristic is a practical approach towards learning and problem solving that does not aim to obtain perfect results, just satisfactory ones. People do it every day. Sometimes machines have to do it as well to function in the real world. Employing a heuristic behavior is accepting the conditions of reality and adapting to them. Realizing and accepting that achieving perfection in any area of life is not a reasonable goal, one can realistically focus on achieving progressively improved results as they learn. The name of the blog is a recognition of this fact of life. The content of the blog will also be an exemplification of this fact, as I expect my approach to programming and to the process of documenting will improve with time.
This is more like a log than a blog. A conversational account of some of the things I am looking into, mostly programming. The theme is simple: look at problems and their solutions, capture the process of developing those solutions. I’ve known I can write about my work, but it always seemed a chore. Maybe it doesn’t have to be that way. With enough practice I may learn to love documenting ideas. Supposing it will benefit me in the long run, I’m giving it a try; and it might also benefit someone else one day. The wide objective is to learn something about what I do, and learn how to do it better. And one day I may be able to capture and describe that pleasure of figuring stuff out, of slowly understanding a problem and discovering how something works by a progressive process of better and more accurately targeted questions and tests. It is this addictive investigation process that has driven me since childhood to try and learn as much as possible about the world around me, with a focus on engineering and more specifically computers. It is the realization of never being able to achieve perfection, such realistic heuristic, that has kept me targeted and away from getting lost in unnecessary intricacies.
The site is designed to look like a book. Simple, white background, some grey accents, black fonts. It opens with a title page which turns into a contents page when you scroll. Post pages are simple, displaying content in a single column. They allow for special sections like code blocks or images to break the text. I’ve tried to keep everything as simple as possible.
The speech is over, now I can get to the important stuff.