Evolution Of My Blog Categories
You may have noticed that there are no categories on my blog (except the default one, which I renamed from “uncategorized” to “assorted”). It is so by purpose.
The reasoning behind this is based on an agile development principle: Measure, Don’t Guess1, and is also in line with the general advice against including the category in permalinks2.
So, instead of “guessing” my categories, I decided to undertake a small experiment: I’ll wait until I’d have written enough articles, and see what categories naturally arise with my writing. My first checkpoint is at 10 posts, with an option to defer decisions for other 5-10 posts.
Eventually, from what I’ve written by now, certain category candidates seems to emerge already. For one, most of my posts are about simplicity of software design, which really is a matter of code organization, which in turn is an expression for a more general interest of mine: Personal productivity, effectiveness, and efficiency (i.e. organizing stuff, getting things done, etc.)
Another quite present aspect so far is communication. The way people communicate ideas (like the idea of simplicity) and values (explicitly or, more often, implicitly), or the way code communicates itself (as revealing intention is an important aspect of simplicity).
My, perhaps not immediately apparent, third point of interest is soft, long-term causality, that is, things that don’t have immediately obvious “big bang” effect, but an effect that gently but steadily evolves over time, unnoticed until it’s too late – a boiling frog syndrome, sort of. An example of this is my talent-banishing optimization hypothesis.
Obviously, much of this has a strong relation to psychology, another of my interests.
Finally, when I also account for the many ideas I currently have about things I’d like to write about, there are many more categories, or perhaps series titles, I can think of. But, as I said, my actual checkpoint is still ahead, so lets see where I end up.
Till then, cheers!
- also expressed in the OptimizeLast rule [↩]
- Look for the 5/29/08 update, it explains that you’d be in trouble if you wanted to change your categories later. There are more good arguments in comment #29 to this post on techcounter [↩]
