Rui CarmoPeople who’ve been following this site for a while (say, over at least a couple of years) have surely noticed a number of changes in style, theme and mood.
Such things tend to be less obvious to an author, since writing tends to reflect one’s worldview, and that tends to be internally consistent - i.e., it can be plotted as a continuous line, rather than the seemingly random state vectors that are externalized upon writing.
Poring over some of the archives, however, all of it becomes rather more obvious to me. Quite a lot has changed both personally and professionally over the years, and, to be honest, not all of it is an improvement - at least in the sense that I find myself much less inclined to publicly address a number of topics.
For instance, I’m reticent about mentioning Dilbert-grade organizational patterns these days, because being in management means your staff may get the wrong impression from what you write. Or debate technology strategy, because your boss may wonder about your support of the official party line.
Or Marketing, because, in much the same way as design, everyone has an opinion about how things should be done, even if they haven’t any real expertise in the field. And so on.
This makes writing anything of interest (or even of consequence) regarding what I’m really thinking these days a rather demanding and convoluted exercise not unlike tiptoeing around a minefield with clown shoes, and to be quite frank, that is the biggest reason I’ve kept to myself regarding a number of topics.
Perhaps it’s time to reverse that trend.