Thought Museums on the Internet
I have spent a lot of time reading blogs. Especially recently. It started with me reading a post by Joel Spolsky, The Duct Tape Programmer. It was about an interview of Jamie Zawinski, in a book called Coders at Work by Peter Seibel. I don’t know if it was a promotion or he wrote about it because he found it fascinating. But it caught my attention. I downloaded a copy of the book on my kindle. I don’t know if I would have started reading the book if I came across it otherwise. Since then, I have been spending a lot of time reading essays and articles.
I don’t exactly remember when I started frequenting Joel’s blog. I know it was three years ago when I was still in college. It might have been because I was very interested in WordPress at that point, and I saw a post about him just moving to WordPress from something he wrote and maintained. (He actually moved because Matt Mullenweg had been trying to get him to from very long.) Regardless, I stumbled across his blog. I think his blog is nothing short of a treasure. He is a good writer. He doesn’t use complex language, and it feels like he was really into writing what he was writing when he was writing it. He has a lot of opinions but I guess that’s what appealed to me in his blog. The other thing that his blog had was that it was simple and mobile responsive, and being a web person, it appealed to me a lot.
One other personal website that I keep visiting is Paul Graham’s. His website has probably been unchanged for nearly two decades, and hence isn’t mobile responsive. Because of that, my first thought was that I probably won’t be coming to his site often. However, after I read one of his essays, I have visited his website more than anyone else’s. Like Joel, Paul also has a lot of opinions. His essays are usually about programming, programmers, startups and how those affect the world around us. They have been highly thought provoking for me for two reasons. One, some of the topics that he has explored in his essays have resonated with me. Two, some essays have given me other perspectives on things I have been curious about.
All of this is obviously very fascinating and interesting to me since I work in the software world and it might not be to you. But I am sure there are people who put out their thoughts and opinions on their blogs or vlogs or podcasts, which interest you. I think we are curious and interested in thoughts and opinions of people like these because they are successful (by our definition of success, not theirs) and seem to be enjoying what they do and write about. For us their blogs can be a window to their thought processes and can tell us about what is doable in our professional and/or personal lives.
In my humble opinion, these corners of the polygon of internet should be called thought museums. I call them museums because I think they are similar to museums in inspiring people, apart from collecting artefacts. They have inspired me to build my own thought museum in a hope that my thoughts impact someone else in a similar way. So excuse me while I go and build my own thought museum!
P.S. Here are some of Joel’s and Paul’s essays that I find interesting
Joel’s:
- The Joel Test
- The Development Abstraction Layer
- Getting things done when you’re only a grunt
- Choice = Headaches
- Humane Programming
Paul’s:
Notes for the unaware
- Joel Spolsky is most famous for creating Stack Overflow with Jeff Atwood
- Paul Graham is known for co-founding YCombinator
- Matt Mullenweg is the creator of WordPress
