Notes

I once presented my vision for how a group could automate enough of a bunch of content publishing tasks to allow the people that created the content to take care of publishing site refreshes rather than requiring the involvement of engineering folks and doing code-and-content pushes.

The person I was talking to responded, “Are you trying to engineer yourself out of a job?”

It was a startling moment because our new product development was usually gated on engineering effort – freeing up our time to focus on product development and making the content creator’s job more rewarding by allowing them to make and publish content on their own seemed like a win for everybody. Of course I wanted to engineer us out of the job of pushing content so we could focus on improving the code.

The future audience weighs heavily on me when I’m writing things to post to the Internet. I assume virtually everything I post to the Internet could eventually be read by anyone I know now or may know in the future. I am fortunate that I went through the most pronounced part of my angry, stupid new Internet teenager phase in a forum with less robust archiving than Usenet.

It should matter less to me but it’s hard to post something that says anything at all when all I can think of is how will this seem years from now to people I don’t even know yet.