I have a tradition of starting new projects with the phrase “Hello, World!” To any student of programming, the reference will be obvious, but for the benefit of all you non-computer-geeks who may mistakenly stumble across this blog and actually stay for a few minutes, I’ll explain. Besides being an appropriately expansive greeting for a new blog, “Hello, World!” is, by convention, used to introduce students of any programming language to the fundamental features of that language. By learning how to write a program that simply displays that phrase (or any other), you can learn a lot about the way programs are constructed in a new language. Over time, Hello World becomes a very simple rosetta stone when trying to pick up a new programming or scripting language.
So, why another ‘Hello from me? I’m frankly not a very good blogger; every now and then I write a post on my personal blog, but mostly it sits there, displaying the old stuff day after day. I don’t really think that’s going to change ~ and frankly, I don’t think that “make make” will be all that much better ~ but what I do want to do is give myself another, slightly different, place to put stuff that is less about me and more technical. I am a system administrator who has a lot of training as a programmer, and as such, I find that there’s not much of a niche for me in geekdom; most people identify as one or the other, and there is often a hint of animosity between the two groups. Regardless, there is a lot that each side can learn from the other, and my goal is to post the bits and pieces that I’ve learned about both sysadmin-ing and coding in hopes that someone, somewhere, will find a few of them useful.
