Blog review: "Martin's Programming Blog"

“Martin’s Programming Blog” is chock full of posts and discussions that a programmer looking for solutions might find useful.

A quick look at the archives grouped by tags reveals the author, Martin Trojer, writes mostly about Clojure.  He also puts a good deal of writing into F#, JVM, and .NET.  He writes about quite a few other topics as well, mostly languages.

The minimalist home page simply listing hyperlinked post titles shows Trojer posts pretty faithfully once a month, and from what I can tell, these are dense and focused posts.  These posts sometimes spark discussions among his readers whom often have further questions or experience to share.

In one post, Trojer shared a hack to his Chromebook for using a Chrubuntu developers environment (Ubuntu for Chrome).  Giving a positive product review of the Chromebook, he recommended getting an SD card and using a few special methods for installation and use.  All questions were answered by Trojer or another reader. And, all the readers seem to be on the same page (pun intended) with the same valence.

In another post, Trojer critiqued what he said are thetraditional business planning strategies when they are used within software companies. He said a software company’s main assets are its programmers and innovation, not its products per se, but a traditional model that tries to make projects adhere to a strict schedule run contrary to good programming an innovation. He said a company should ask whether it is primarily a software company or a service company, which will inform it of whether it should plan and implement with more flexibility or not.

As a note about the blog as a blog, I'll say it is quite minimalist, which I kind of appreciate in this case.  The organization is thrust to the fore, so it is easy to see what is there and to find what you might want.  That said, it could use a little more graphics.

Maybe Trojer wants to avoid overuse of graphics when they don't lend anything useful to the writing, but, in case you haven't noticed, I think you can always find a graphic that will make your writing more interesting (and, adding interest is useful), even if it's not super-relevant (and, mere juxtaposition creates meaningful connection, btw).

In an interesting choice, Trojer left out an about page.  I mean, it is pretty clear what the site is about, and you get somewhat of a sense of who Trojer is through what he writes about and how he writes it.  I guess, in accord with the structure-forward design, Trojer probably wants the content to speak for itself, but, still, I would like to know a little more about him and his thoughts about, and intentions for, the blog.  I mean, sure, good code is best defined by how you can use it, but good code also has commenting, a meta level as a point of entry... The metaphor I'm using here is a bit of a stretch, but it makes sense, right?