Arrivederci

All around the web you can find blogs which were once tended with care, day-by-day, week-by-week. Then one day ... nothing. You're left wondering what happened. Did their author literally get hit by a bus? Or what?

Rather than leave you in a similar state of puzzlement, I thought it more polite to sign-off explicitly. I have not (hopefully) been hit by a bus, but I've become a whole lot busier. I was quite surprised to see that, according to "wc" anyway, I have this year written approaching 30,000 words on this blog. But for the foreseeable future, I'm going to be rather too busy with other things to keep that up. So I think it's better for now to just stop.

I've enjoyed writing these posts, and I've enjoyed the discussions that they sparked, mostly by email behind the scenes. (Drop me a line if you have any thoughts about them. I'm sure I'll have time for that.) I think I understand agile development much better now through writing about it here. I'm glad I got various ideas about teaching programming down in black and white. I was surprised by the popularity of the robots game. I was also surprised by how hard it is to write up recipes that I cook all the time in a form that might work for other people.

And I've still got a list of things that I intended to write about but didn't: thoughts on the difference between programming languages and programming systems; an "absentee review" and retrospective on The Mother of All Demos; a development of Meta-II called "metaphor", which I've put on GitHub but not really explained. At the end of the day I think I have made some progress following up my two initial trains of thought: that we could do programming a whole lot better, and that we could learn something from another group of people who produce things every day, the people who work in kitchens. But I think there's a lot more to be said, a lot more to be discovered.

So, I hope you enjoy the posts that remain here. (They will probably make more sense if you start from the beginning.) I think I'll be back one day to add some more. But I may be some time ...