Intro 🐬

Guess who’s turning five? Not me.

But if you guessed Programming Digressions, you just got yourself a door prize!

So yes, to celebrate a milestone in the life of our tech blog—starting its life back in July 2014, our blog is turning five this month!—I’ve put together something different for you.

Here’s the deal: Over the past five years, if there’s one recurring theme I have seen turn up (over and over again) in feedback from readers, it is this: You all love to read stuff that’s original, substantial, and just as importantly, stuff that will engage you instead of put you to sleep. Yep, we all like to linger at the fun intersection of knowledge and culture.

With that, I invite you to enjoy this unique post. You need to bring only two things with you:

1. A curious mind, suitably located somewhere in your very own cranium.
2. A minimum of one funny-bone in your (lithe) body.

With that, let me be the first one to wish Programming Digressions a Happy 5th Birthday. You’ve come a long way, buddy!

With a Splash 🐙

Like the snow-white egret above—poised to impale with its pointy beak an unwary fish or two in the pond—let’s peer into some past themes (and memes) that have appeared here on Programming Digressions over the past five years.

What kind of a catch we come up with, I can’t quite promise. But to find exactly that, here we go, with a splash. And please don’t call me Ishmael; you could, I suppose, except that it doesn’t happen to be my name. Just call me Akram.

Of Words, and Nerds 👓

First, The Nerds (But Of Course)

Ah yes, we regaled in the joy of what can be ours when mind and machine meld in the transformative crucible of coevolution:

• Plato And The Nerd
• Return of Plato And The Nerd
• Plato And The Nerd Strikes Back

There you go. Nerd up.

Second, The Words (Yep)

Good prose is like a windowpane 💠
~ George Orwell, from “Why I Write” (in England Your England and Other Essays)

And the joy of words—the endless sense of wonder with which they suffuse yours truly—was never far from our view. Sometimes, in fact, it was front and center:

• On Writing: Or Why I Write
• On Writing: Or How I Write
• On Writing: Or Wow I Write
• On Writing: Or Now I Write
• On Writing: Or A Row With How I Write

If I can write, so can you. Trust me on this one.

Write. Right now—there’s a world of ideas to be imagined by you. Just you.

Of Memes, and Themes 🎬

We checked out the essence of a variety of subjects that happened to occupy your blogger’s attention at that particular period in his evolution:

• What Can Leonardo da Vinci do for Me?
• Domain-Driven Design (DDD) Defies Dogma
• Best Deep Learning Books (Pragmatic)
• Best Algorithms Books (Part 2)
• Blockchain Adventures!

Diverse-enough for you? What, you want more!

WHAAA?!

Of Dreams, and Seams 🚂

Together, we imagined stuff hitherto undreamed of by fellow humans:

• Reveling In The Glory Of Software (On A Stormy Night!)
• Why I Worry About AI (Artificial Intelligence)
• World’s 10 Coolest Sentences Get Gangsta Treatment!

So go forth and imagine. You can do it. I know you can, and with a POW!

Of Languages and Such 🎥

Oh yes, tech paradigms and languages—of the programming kind—kept on making our world go around:

• Best Clojure Books
• Best Reactive Programming Books (2019)
• Krazy About Kafka!
• Best Go Programming Books (2019)
• When Object Orientation Met Functional Programming
• Best Scala Books

Oh, for a bit of history—and interjecting but a minor detail here—we pulled up stakes and moved to our current site right around the December of 2018, which is when the visitor count at our old-and-no-longer-maintained digs had soared well past 100,000.

Now go forth and realize what you’ve imagined.

My friend, make it happen.

Now.