I thought I should keep a blog.
You may ask why.
Last time I kept a blog, it was pabout a piece of software that I was writing](https://xdelta.blogspot.com/). It began in the 90s, me as an undergraduate computer science major, and we would have called it free software then. Thirty years ago we didn't have open-source. Remember freshmeat.net?
I wasn't blogging in the 90s, though. Spent a few more years in school, worked briefly for an infamous file-system designer, and then got a big tech job. Remember Blogger?
So, I would post infrequently about Xdelta, a delta-compression program used let's-be-honest primarily for distributing warez. It and the blog and why I kept working on it? It was to find joy in computer programming.
Working as a software engineer, in a big company, you can find lots of ways to remove that joy. It's a job, and they pay you--it's not for the joy of programming.
I kept working on Xdelta, a project of my own, letting nobody tell me how or what to do, or when to do it. The blog was a way to remember that I had a project and that it brought me joy to work on it.
Years passed and I left the big company for a startup, which also had its ways of removing the joy from programming. Nice people.
The world of open-source had been a hobby, a way to connect with people, to appreciate computers and learn what they can do, and then it became a job. Says the startup to me:
Josh, we need OpenTelemetry to succeed. Your job is to help it.
I was conflicted over this. For a long time. OpenTelemetry was not immediately a project full of joy, but I could see the potential to develop an open-source career path. It worked out. I've been able to choose interesting projects, again and again, and the best part? Neither the project nor the company can dictate how to get it done, because that would break the open-source model.
One of the first posts on my Xdelta blog was a note thanking Microsoft with a note of sarcasm for its free Visual Studio C++ download, which I had used to build a Windows release. Today, Microsoft pays me to work in open-source full time. My younger self would have loved this, and I do too.