Nothing Was Delivered

Right now you are reading this blog. Your reasons are your own. My reasons for writing, however, effects us both, so I thought I’d lay them out here. 

This has always been somewhat of an aimless blog. I started writing some slice-of-life essays, added some recipes, and throwing in some bits about computers. Because there was no focus, I never really new what to write about, and as such I posted rather infrequently. Most of what I wrote I found myself putting out on Twitter. I lacked the attention span for long form blogging. Meanwhile, I never saw much traffic because who was the target audience, anyway?

But now I’ve got a new project, and as such the focus of Nothing Was Delivered is going to change some. If you’ve followed me before, I hope you’ll find the new content interesting. If you found your way here because of the is new content, I hope you enjoy it, and please check out the back catalog, so to speak. 

Here’s the deal. I’ve gotten bored lately. I had a band, which fell apart. I thought about starting a new one, or striking out on my own, but haven’t felt inspired. I’ll leave the details for a separate post, but ultimately that was something I had done, and I wanted a new challenge. 

So a while ago I started poking around with programming. Like many Americans, I sit in front of a computer most of the day, and when I’m on the go I have my iPhone with me. The power and flexibility of these devices constantly amazes me, but I realized I had no idea how they worked, at a basic level. We all know that computers see 1’s and 0’s, but how the hell does that translate to all the things that go on on these screens? 

In particular, I was interested in Apple’s ecosystem. I started reading Apple rumor sites, which lead to technical descriptions that I couldn’t make heads or tails of. I also stumbled on some Apple centric podcasts, which lead to others that were less fan sites and more developer focused. I would sit through the technical bits of shows like Hypercritical so that I could get to the more general discussions of Mac OS X or iOS. Eventually, I started to pick up some of the low-level lingo, or I would Google some phrases, and eventually these parts didn’t seem so scary. I found the book Code, by Charles Petzold, which gave a good fundamental explanation about what was going on inside these machines. I started to see technology as a puzzle that I could figure out, given time. 

Now I have a project that I want to work on (more on that another time), and wanted to document it. This is mostly for my benefit, as I’m pretty much teaching myself as I go along. I have no formal training, though I’ve bought some books and completed some tutorials online. I figured if I had a place to think through these problems out loud as I come to them, they would be easier to work out. 

I also thought I could offer a bit of a different perspective from many of the tech and Apple centric blogs. Sure, I’m as much of a white dude in his thirties as most of the other writers in this sphere, but I’m coming to this as someone that has very little idea about how this technology works. There are many wonderful writers that are very knowledgable about Apple’s past and present, and therefor able to give insightful context the changes this industry is seeing. I wanted to approach this as someone who has never been to a WWDC, hasn’t witnessed the evolution of Apple’s APIs over the last several decades, and in fact just learned what an API was recently (in layman’s terms, my understanding is that it is short a series of code snippets that an operating system creator or platform vendor gives that allows other developers access to more complicated technologies e.g. GPS APIs on a smart phone that let apps get your location without writing everything from scratch). 

So that’s the new focus. There will still be more general purpose writing. In fact, I hope that by getting in the habit of writing more, I’ll be even more likely to turn to blogging to get out whatever I have on my mind. I do think that the food posts are going away. I actually intend to spin those off into a separate blog at some point. 

I’m rather excited about having a new direction. Here’s hoping that this blog will keep me honest.