Charlie is Neurotic
Charlie has a neurosis, sensing that people are watching, but having no idea who they are or why they are watching.
I have just received an email telling me that my Atom feed presents only the most recent weblog entry. Because I have been posting a few times a day, this means that subscribers are not getting the whole story. I checked with Blogger’s settings, but I was unable to see how to change anything regarding the Atom feed. To provide subscribers with another option, I have now added an RSS feed too. But, that too seems to present only the most recent entry. So if you subscribe to this blog, you may need to visit its webpage to get the whole story, at least while I am catching up on the story of Charlie and therefore creating a handful of entries each day.
Knowing that at least one person is following the Life of Charlie, I thought I would talk a little about why I am maintaining this blog. I hope also to learn why you are reading it.
I have mentioned a number of times that I am a self-taught programmer, that ASP.NET is my first development environment, and that I have been using ASP.NET for about three years. I feel that this puts my experience level at about that of a third-year university student. Do I tell you this to excuse some of the foolish mistakes that I have made and will inevitably make? Not at all. I tell you this to explain why I am maintaining this blog.
Coming into this industry from “outside,” I have noticed that there is a huge volume of literature explaining the “how” of programming, but a dearth of literature explaining the “why”. In an earlier weblog entry, I mentioned my frustration that in Coder to Developer, Mike Gunderloy pulls from his hat an architectural diagram, without any explanation as to how he arrived at it. This “I’ll show you how, but I won’t explain why” approach has frustrated my efforts at learning how to program. Unless there is something unique about me (and believe me, there’s not), this must frustrate every novice, hobbyist, and intermediate developer too.
So that is the reason I decided to keep a weblog chronicling my effort to create a full web application. In most weblog entries, I am not paying much attention to the how, but paying attention to the why. In other words, I am doing my best to publish the sort of documents that I myself want to read, and believe others want to read, too.
There is a benefit to Charlie, too. In order to write a weblog entry, I must sufficiently organise my thoughts on a topic. I firmly believe that if you cannot describe something in words or in pictures, you do not sufficiently understand the topic. The discipline of writing about Charlie’s architecture, or features, or ticklish spots, means that I must first form a solid understanding of those things.
That then explains why I am writing this weblog.
The remaining question, is why are you reading it?
Since moving my weblog to Google’s Blogger, I no longer have a log of how many people are reading it. The only person I know about is the person who told me about the Atom feed, but the logs told me that many more either subscribe or visit. So please, dear readers, speak up. If you agree or disagree with something I write about, please let me know. If you like some things I write about but find other things uninteresting, please let me know. If you’d rather not leave a public comment, you may contact me. Let me know why you visit, and I’ll try to ensure that my entries are of interest to you.
by Alister Jones | Next up: Charlie has a Stubborn Master →
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Hi,
I like the way you write and explain concepts. I'm here to learn and I'm very interested in the life of Charlie. You said that you are first a designer, then a developer: I hope there will be various posts related to the design phase of Charlie. What about posting (here or in another blog) about design concepts? Thanks for the good work.
Garbin.
Hi,
I really appreciate the way you show the “why” of your decisions and not only the “how” as I share your frustration when I come to some technical literature.
Like you, I’m a self made developer, doing my business first as a marketing consultant with some skills in graphic design. I began to develop with asp.net 3 years ago and still looking for a good solution to make my clients websites.
I’m not happy with any of the CMS or frameworks I tried until now (DotNetNuke, Rainbow Portal, Cuyahoga, Umbraco, MojoPortal, ndCMS, AxCMS, SharpCMS or the MS starter kits.
Even if each of them have interesting features and a lot of stuff to learn from, they also have too many drawbacks to be used in production. Some of them are too complicated, some others want us to adopt their page layout and almost all of them have poor user permissions granularity.
I ended deciding to build my own set of tools or perhaps, a kind of framework. Then I fund your blog and saw that you are already going in that direction.
By now I keep reading and I’ll try to give you some feedback in the relevant articles when I’ll get the overall picture.
Thank you for sharing your work and vision.
Daniel.
Also a Hi from me, I just happened to stumble upon your blog from a google on the profile provider :P
I really like your style of writing also it seems rather familiar to be kicking at DotNetNuke for about the same reasons that I don't like it.
The only problem I see about what your doing is that, it all has been done before.
And from what I can tell in my latest research for the ideal CMS / CMS framework there are a couple out there who do a lot of what Charlie will do quite elegantly.
You might want to have a look at:
www.sitefinity.com
and
www.kentico.com
as competition, since they to me look a lot further up the food chain where Charlie is concerned.
Wish you all the best with Charlie and whenever it's out there I would love to take a look.
Regards,
Mischa
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