The first attempts at everything will probably be bad. That was true at least for me when I first began programming. I remember I was programming something in Python and the library function I called returned a tuple. At that point I had never seen a tuple and didn’t know how to access the elements. Instead of looking it up I used a different tool I had learned: regular expressions. So to access an element out of a tuple I first converted the tuple to a string and then matched the digits with a regular expression.

My early attempts at blogging will probably be like this. I’ll still think they’re good or interesting but I’ll look back many years from now with some amount of pity at the idiocy and ineptitude of my former self. Hopefully I’ll at least have a modicum of mercy.

At least what makes me feel better is reading 20 year old blog posts from people I respect now. Everyone has to start somewhere.