On twitter and the viral spread of interesting people

Up until recently I never understood what the hype (or at least ex-hype) around twitter was all about. To me it mostly seemed like a place for a lot of more or less interesting people to post more or less interesting things about what they were doing at the current moment in time. Mostly the usages I had seen on twitter consisted of “I am at X eating a burrito/hotdog/burger. Its great/good/bad.” or similar activities (In hindsight I agree now that that might say more about the people I know who use twitter rather than twitter itself). Not exactly stuff that triggers my “Ooo, thats interesting” gene.

Recently however, I learned that there are actually a relatively large number of interesting people tweeting about interesting stuff. What I really like about twitter is the viral effect of the retweet function. If a tweet is sufficiently interesting sooner or later someone you are following will retweet it. Now you may ask yourself “But how do I start following interesting people to begin with?” – What I did was to start following the people behind the interesting blogs I read such as this, this and this on twitter. When you begin following people you think are interesting you will also begin to get retweets about the people they think are interesting. This gives you a great opportunity to start following new and interesting people that you never knew about in the first place. That is something that triggers my “Ooo, thats interesting” gene.

Another thing I have to admit is how limited the time I have to read blogs is. Making sure I’m following interesting people on twitter also makes sure that I will get notified about the interesting blog posts that get posted out there. There are still a number of core blogs I follow religiously, but in this case twitter allows me to quickly screen new and interesting blogs posts so I can apply my time where I get most out of it.

And of course my twitter profile is sunewt.

On blogging

On blogging. More accurately, on this blog and on me. Over the years I’ve had several attempts at creating a blog, without much success. How do you fail at blogging you may ask? You start by not writing posts. Usually I’ve been keeping on refining and polishing posts to a point where they were never polished. This is a pretty common problem. But why not apply this to blogging?

So what will you find on this blog? Usually my thoughts, ideas and views on things. Things, technology and situations in the IT sector and stuff that I experience in my work as a software engineer and software architect for an internet startup. Other interests are development processes, management and organization structure.

My posts will range from thoughts, viewpoints to quite technical posts with code examples and I will make sure to categorize them accordingly. Other than that: Enjoy and hopefully you will find some of this stuff interesting.