My main reaction to the idea of information overload is one of disbelief. David Allen does a wonderful job giving words to that disbelief:

"If information overload was the issue you’d walk into a library and die. The first time you surf the web, you blow up."

Now as we don’t have people dying or suffering a mental meltdown caused by information "overload", clearly we don’t mean "overload".

What we’re trying to say is; "Look, there’s too much information here to digest". To which my answer is; so?

If someone is clutching his stomach complaining about "food overload" caused by there being too much food to digest, you’d ask "but why in the world do you try to eat it all at the same time?!"

Take Television

Information abundance isn’t new. Just think about the thousands of television programs, the hundreds of hours you could spend in front of the tube. Hard news, breaking news, reportages, documentaries…

Hear anyone complain?

Between 1993-2002 television program supply in Finland (PDF) increased by 73%; 23 additional TV program hours per day. Yet television viewing time over that same period increased by only 40 minutes a day.

And no-one is collapsing under TV, entertainment or information overload.

Why?

Don’t Try To Finish

Nobody in his right mind will try to finish watching all programs on all channels.

Likewise no-one around you is attempting to read all newspaper article in all newspapers. Or sitting in a library speed-reading all books.

And you yourself, when you sat down and connected to the World Wide Web, were just "surfing the web"; you weren’t actually trying to reach the "last page" and finish, were you?

The same holds true for your RSS feeds. Yes, there’re 1000+ unread items. Great! Even if everyone would stop publishing today, you would still have a ton of great reads ahead.

Because face it, you don’t need to "catch up" with all those unread items. Stand up! Surf! Welcome to the information wave.

Gmail works great as a personal nerve center.

An efficient way to get data into the system, apart from typing it or using the Send To button or GmailThis bookmarklet, is a combination of Google Reader and FeedBurner.

Whenever I come across something in Google Reader that I might want to use as reference material later on, I don’t star it (S) but Share It (SHIFT + S).

I have a FeedBurner feed setup for the feed of those Shared Items and have configured that feed to have an email version available as well.

Subscribe to that email version and voila, once a day the full texts of my shared items arrives in my Gmail, gets labeled DB (database) and removed from view.

In karate there is an image that’s used to define the position of perfect readiness: “mind like water”.
– David Allen, Getting Things Done

I find web applications, scripts, fascinating. Like water their natural state is stateless. And like water they have no memory at all.

Every time you interact with a web application is its first time ever. Every single time is its first and only time.
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Nothing beats the authentic smell of fresh home-made bread and coffee in the early morning.

Bread and coffee both have those authentic smells you just can’t fake.

For years I’ve been kneading my own dough and baking my own bread. And even though the time that I have available has been considerably reduced as I have gathered more contracts, I still make my own bread. And coffee.
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To strive towards the highest and even most noble code of conduct is not only a matter of personal conviction but also makes for sound business sense.
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Godfried Bomans, a Dutch writer, always talked about his family. He would mention uncles and aunts endlessly, always changing their names, ages; they didn’t exist — they were simply a vehicle to introduce his story.

My single most important lessons are like that.
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One of the questions you get to answer most as a web developer is; “Where is your web site?”

Incredulous as it seems, an astounding number of web developers or people otherwise engaged in web-centric business have either no web site or something that barely resembles a web site.

I had opted for the latter.

Programming

See, when you’re a web developer people expect you dish out a site (expectation #1) that says “wow, look at me dude — I’m happening!” (expectation #2) whereas in reality you’re busy meeting the expectations of your clients.

When you finally get to doing your own site, Friday night at 4:18 AM, writing the words “Hello World” seems like a good enough idea. Somewhere down the line you make some more time (“I won’t be long, honey!”), add a page or two about how good you are — and that’s basically it.

The Truth

As the X-Files put it; it’s out there.

Web designers have portfolio’s with cute little thumbnails. Pure SEO’s have logo’s of clients and their ranking to point to.

But as a web developer you have zills. Nada. Notti. If you’re worth your money your work is invisible. There is nothing to point to.

Take Notepad for example. Everyone running Windows has it on their computer. Virtually everyone has used it at one point or another. It’s extremely simple in what it does, but could you program it? Apart from the general idea, the vision, could you write the actual lines to make your computer perform these tasks?

Given that, did you at any moment in time think “wow, this programmer was really good” or “hmm, dunno what this guy was thinking but…”.

No.

Tired

I hate to present myself as someone I’m not. I’m not a corporate person. Would I handle things “The Right Way” I’m sure I could make a lot more money than I do now.

But I’m a programmer and the only corporate, the only business side in me is my golden rule to underpromise and overdeliver.

As such I spend long hours, I mean long, programming other people’s visions, projects and ideas. By the time I’m done I don’t feel like editing my site and making myself look a little bit more corporate, a little bit more professional, a little bit more desirable.

By that time I just want to tell it like it is.

That’s what a blog should be for, should be about.

This is my site.

Hat tip to Kim whose post about blogging instilled in me the desire to go this route