On the mundane act of writing about programming

Zed's post about his RubyFringe presentation and Reg Braithwaite's post about his retirement from Ruby and blogging carry a similar message: be subversive. Don't do something ordinary and boring. While I agree with part of the message, I have to disagree with the idea that blogging about ordinary programming isn't subversive.

Taken by itself, a post about FakeWeb for mocking web requests isn't subversive or game changing. But when millions of programmers create posts about seemingly ordinary and mundane topics, things get interesting. Pair that with a decent search engine and a good community site and you're putting O'Reilly out of business.

Now that's subversive.

Not only that, you're spreading free knowledge. You're enabling countless newbies to become a bad ass programmers without having to spend thousands on college.

That's game changing.