As a programmer, I've always been able to sketch out diagrams and documents about something I was going to build. I'd imagine how an information system would be built and what it needed to do. I'd then flesh it out until it was something living and breathing.

I'm now 33. I just brought home my second kid. But I still think there are "blueprints" out there in any point of your career that you can aspire to. There's a perfect world for systems that are fleshed out in science fiction books I've read. A friend of mine Maki introduced me years ago to a series of books by Orson Scott Card beginning with Enders Game. In the series, Card among other things fleshes out specifically how people would use newsgroups and the like, the Net, in everyday life. It speaks about how these interconnected systems would be used to identify the best and the brightest young men to lead the human race against the other.

Now, this world may be science fiction but Card and others like him have imagined and fleshed out the human side of how we would apply teams and technology and pit them against the worlds hardest problems.

We improve by filling our imaginations with the framework of ideas from others. You evaluate the discourse and pick and choose which ideas/constructs you value to hold true. For my own part, I want to create and document a process for what I find true in sci-fi literature and my own IT experiences. I want to weave stories and open source applications that exemplify these ideas and draw upon one another until they form the framework for a culture and systems that draw upon the imaginations of other programmers and non-programmers alike.

The goals I have are to take my ideas and energy and put enough elbow grease into building out ideas for systems in the open source arena that inspire others to contribute so that together we can build something that is greater than I imagined it could be but held together in a framework that maintains the integrity of design and a certain elegance in the solution.

Lots of run on sentences but I wanted to just let my ideas out without worrying about formalities in this blog entry.