I’ve always sort of figured that this blog was a place to post things I was just learning, rather than a place to publish tutorials about technologies that I have more expertise in.

Because of the nature of our field, and the amount of new technologies that are always coming out, I’m far more interested in learning than I am in teaching.  There are already plenty of great teachers out there who are blogging, writing or lecturing.  I don’t really aspire to sell myself as a teacher of technologies—that would take far too much time and energy.

Instead, I see this blog as a forum for my attempts to learn new technologies—e.g. WPF and Silverlight.  I’m always looking for new ways to motivate myself to learn new technologies and having a blog is a good way to force myself to dive in and start learning something new.  When I realize that I haven’t posted anything for a few days, I feel the urge to start pulling together the next post.  Then, because I know I’m going to have to write about it, I find that I force myself to explore whatever the topic is in a much deeper manner than I would if I were just reading a book or attending a class.

This has been working out great so far.  I’m discouraged by how little time I have to study these new technologies.  I’d like to post far more frequently than I do.  But at least I’m gradually learning some new bits and pieces, about technologies like WPF and Silverlight.

Reminding myself of my goals also helps me to just relax and not worry so much about making mistakes.  I’m just capturing on “paper” what I’m learning, as I learn it.  Since I’m only beginning the journey of grokking whatever it is, I don’t need to worry about whether I get it right or not.

Remembering all of this led me to change the tagline of this blog.  Instead of offering up my thoughts on various topics, I now see this as “learning out loud”.  That perfectly describes what I think I’m doing—learning new stuff, stumbling through it, and capturing the current state of my knowledge so that I can come back and refer to it later.

So let the journey continue—there’s still so much to learn!