Bryan Cantrill (and Friends!) on Blogging
“Many of us at Sun are doing work that could change the world. We need to do a better job of telling the world…Blogging is a good way to do this.” – Tim Bray, 2004
The impetus for the Technical Blogging episode was me asking Bryan some questions about his blogging: how he got started, why he continues, the most surprising impact, and so on.
That got Bryan thinking (and writing) about his blogging journey. In true Bryan collaborative fashion, he instantly assembled an impressive panel for an open discussion:
Adam Leventhal, one of the most impressive technologists to take that movement forward – and also Bryan’s longtime co-conspirator in all things from DTrace to Oxide and Beastie Boys Book tours (more on that later)
Since Bryan’s personal blogging journey began with Some prehistory, let’s start this article with some prehistory related to tech blogging.
Until the early 2000s, it was unthinkable for engineers at tech leaders like Sun Microsystems and Microsoft to openly share their ideas with the world. As Bryan put it: “The dogma held that the company must always speak with one voice, and always in very conventional terms, about how wonderful and great everything was.” An engineer publishing unsanctioned musings was, in most cases, a firing offense.
