Sunday, April 26, 2009

What is this blog for?

In April of 2009, I finally began an effort of digitizing old family photos, documents, and memories. This was a project that I had been intending to tackle for quite a while. In fact, I had previously made a handful of attempts. Each time, the project got reshuffled lower on the priority list when things got busy (as they always seems to do) and I would eventually stop working on it altogether. A future post will explain some of the motivations and mechanisms I am employing to accomplish more focus this time around.

I plan to use this blog to document the project as I work through it. There are many reasons for creating this type of documentation. As a software engineer, I recognize the general need to document your work. The rest of this post will explain how I plan to use this blog.

One of the major consumers of this blog will be myself. I have a terrible terrible memory and will record details of my decision making process here. Basically, I want to make sure I know what the heck I was thinking when I look back at certain decisions along the way. Hopefully, this will help me avoid doing something that makes a planned step or intended use of the archive impossible.

I also plan to use this blog as a collection of technical instructions and procedures that I follow. This way, when I return to the project after a break (hey, life happens), I will remember where I left off and what to do next. This also enables me to accept help offered by others (post a comment to get involved) while ensuring consistency across the whole project.

Lastly, this blog will be used to discuss the project with others. It will keep those interested up to date on my progress and help coordinate the efforts of those participating directly in the project. It will also help me connect to those who have experience working on similar projects and allow me to benefit from their expertise.

These are some of the major reasons this blog exists. The next post will describe more detail about what type of archive I am attempting to create and the components I have selected so far.

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