At the intersection of two worlds
A friend of me recently asked why I use Textpattern for all three of my blogs. Most people don’t even host their own blogs these days, and the rest either use Wordpress or something they rolled from scratch. So why do I use an off-the-shelf blog engine that’s not Wordpress? Flexibility, speed, and security.
Textpattern isn’t really a blogging engine. It’s a CMS that can do blogs easily. For my personal site, I was migrating from hand-written HTML, and I wanted some flexibility to build a site that wasn’t just a blog. As it turned out, I couldn’t even keep the blog updated, much less the rest of the site, but I got addicted to the flexibility. Yes, you can make “real websites” with Wordpress, but there’s a point at which you’re working within the confines of your CMS. Textpattern’s Page/Form + Article model is amazingly flexible, and theming the whole thing with CSS is a cinch. If I want to tweak something, Textpattern’s tag-based markup language often makes it trivial. It would be hard for me to give up the flexibility of Textpattern, especially now that I’ve grown so used to it.
Have you ever noticed how Wordpress blogs always go down when they get Slasdotted or Dugg? From what I’ve heard (and seen), Wordpress is a mess inside. It’s more talky to the database than a poorly-written Rails view! It’s slow, monolithic, and…just gross. Ironically, my Textpattern blog was dreadfully slow for a few months until I figured out the comment system was hitting a defunct spam-checking site to weed out bad comments. Turning that off brought things back to blazing speed. Someday I might write something important, and I’d like for as many people to be able to read it as possible. Speed matters.
Script kiddies seem to love Wordpress. It seems like there’s not a month that goes by without another major Wordpress exploit. There are tools out there to completely automate the process of compromising a Wordpress blog and gaining full access to the underlying filesystem. Yikes! Yes, they’re usually pretty good about patching, but until very recently upgrading Wordpress was a bitch. Not only do I trust the Textpattern developers more, but so few people use it compared to Wordpress’s userbase that it’s not nearly as appealing a target. I like to sleep sound knowing my websites aren’t compromised.
Many of the reasons I chose Textpattern have become irrelevant or resolved, but now that I’ve gotten good at it I’m not about to switch. I like Textile, the flexibility is wonderful, and it Just Works. What more could you want from a CMS?
Now that I’m actively posting to three blogs, I want to make sure I don’t fall too far behind. To that end, I whipped up a little script that pulls the RSS feed from each of my blogs and lets me know how many days it’s been since I last posted.
Hacker: A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. – The Jargon File
Engineer: A person who uses scientific knowledge to solve practical problems. – Princeton WordNet
I have found myself straddling two worlds for some time now: that of the Hacker and that of the Engineer. When I started writing software back in the late nineties, I was very much a hacker. My interest in writing software came out of my constant obsession with tweaking my computer and breaking the systems my dad put in place for me. I love experimenting with and poking at systems of all kinds, and computers have offered a wonderful playground for me.
Over time, I came to understand this thing called “software engineering.” It probably helps that my dad was a programmer and then a project manager at some large firms. I came to appreciate the craft of software development as something special. Any old coder can hack together a solution, but it takes an engineer to build a stable, maintainable, flexible system. By the time college applications rolled around, I made a decision: I would go to college to be an engineer.
Two years into the Computer & Systems Engineering curriculum at RPI, I’ve come full circle. After spending countless hours with engineers studying engineering topics, I’m coming to the realization that they don’t have it all figured out, either. Especially software engineers. Heck, software engineering isn’t even really taught at the undergraduate level. Most programmers get their degree in Computer Science and head out into the world thinking a long project is three weeks. I knew I wanted something different from that, but being able to build things “quick ‘n dirty” and understand an entire system just by poking at it is as important, if not more.
Thus, my new blog: Hacker|Engineer. Sometimes I act like a hacker, and at others I act like an engineer. I see software as a craft more than anything else, and craftsmanship requires many skills and approaches. Developing software as both a craft and as an engineering discipline is critical to technological growth as we increasingly depend on software systems in everything from communication systems to power plants. This blog will be an exploration of both hacking and engineering when it comes to software (and maybe a bit of hardware, too) development.
