Even though I’ve been back from my vacation almost two weeks now, I’m only now managing to get back to writing on my various weblogs. Though I can blame countless numbers of distractions, I will single out computer programming for particular admonition. In my ideal working framework, I would spend half my day programming and the other half writing. In the last weeks, whenever I start programming, I have found it tough to stop. Including today. My immediate programming task is to expand ManilaExporter, an application to export data out of a Manila site so that a user can migrate that information to other sources, such as another weblog. Though relatively straightforward in principle, I’ve continued to run into enough little practical barriers that suck me deeply into the nitty-gritty of programming. (For example, I’m trying to figure out how to indicate to the Python xmlrpclib that my Manila site is emitting ISO-8859-1 even though XML-RPC doesn’t allow for any indication of character encoding. I think that there may be a bug in the xmlrpclib module but it will take some work to track down whether it’s a bug or whether it’s just my misunderstanding of the library.)
So what next? How can I maintain the depth of focus needed to write software without losing sight of the broad vision I am pursuing? Certainly, writing about the details of programming and how it ties into the big picture is my chosen way forward.
