First principles

I'm changing the name of this blog. I chose Ramblings more or less at random, since that was what I was doing and I didn't have any real sense of the direction of the blog. Now, after a couple of years, I still don't have any sense of direction, but at least I think I have an idea of what I'm writing. Partly, it's reviews; books, plays, and operas, but generally when I'm writing on politics or programming, I'm trying to work out exactly what my position is, and to know that I have to start from the very beginning and work through it, step by step. In other words, I have to work it out from First Principles.

Early in my job at Interactive Intelligence, I was assigned to work on the COM API for the primary client application. I didn't know much about COM at the time, although I had tried at my previous job at Sunstorm to create COM DLL's for some games. It didn't really seem to buy much, though, and I eventually abandoned it.

Interactive Intelligence, though, sent me to a DevelopMentor's Guerilla COM, where I learned a lot more about why COM was superior to simple DLL's, and I started to see the point of using them. If I'd taken that class while working for Sunstorm I would have been able to apply it a lot better. Later, I was reading through a COM book - I think it was Don Box's Essential COM - and there was a line in there that said, "Most programmers have to convinced of the utility of COM, because they prefer to reason things out from first principles." This really struck a chord with me, because it was exactly why I had abandoned COM the first time - I couldn't figure out the utility of it - until I was able to work it out from first principles.

At the same time, of course, I also think it's important to have a set of principles in order to guide your life. I was thinking about joining a church a while ago, and when talking to the pastor she told me that ordinarily she would recommend to a candidate certain ways in which their life should change before they became members. She didn't really have any changes for me, though. I think the reason was that the first priority in my life is to have a set of convictions, and work from them. Inside that framework you have flexibility, but this is what you have to have First: Principles.

So hopefully this will help to guide me, both in my writing style and the subjects I choose to write about. If you're reading, I hope you enjoy it.

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